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A Eulogy For My Mother

A Eulogy For My Mother

Last updated on: January 19, 2025 at 3:00 am by John Beckett

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A Eulogy For My Mother 2025-01-18T13:11:48-06:00 John Beckett

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Anita Beckett, my mother, died on January 12, 2025, at the age of 93. This is the eulogy I gave at her funeral on Friday, as best I can remember.

For most of us, our mothers are our first teachers. I can’t ever remember my mother saying “hey John, come over here – I’ve got something I want to teach you.” But I learned so much just from listening to her, watching her, and being around her. And so I want to tell you three things my mother taught me.

My mother taught me to manage money.

My father had many skills, but money management wasn’t one of them. And so sometime before I was born, my parents came to an agreement. My father would bring his paycheck home, sign it and hand it to my mother. She would take it to the bank, hold out enough cash to give them both an allowance, and deposit the rest in the checking account. Bills would come in the mail – she put them in the letter file next to the telephone on the kitchen wall. Some of you may remember that phone, but I doubt you remember the letter file. I do.

Then after payday she’d take out all the bills, open them up, and start writing checks. I watched her pay the electric bill, the water bill, the doctor bill. This was before ordinary people had MasterCard and Visa, but we had Penney’s and Sears. She would look at the statement, look at the checkbook, and decide how much she could pay on them. I remember how happy she was when she could pay them off.

When I got out on my own I did pretty much the same things, and I still do, because my mother taught me to manage money.

My mother taught me to respect women.

One of the checks my mother wrote every month was to the little Baptist church where we went. And because this was a small independent Baptist church, the first Wednesday of every month was business meeting. I didn’t want to be there, but I was there, and I paid attention. And so I knew the treasurer did for the church pretty much what my mother did for our family – count the money, put it in the bank, pay the bills, sketch out a budget and make sure we didn’t spend more than we had. At one point the treasurer either died or moved away, and I told my mother “you should be the church treasurer.”

My mother laughed. And it wasn’t a funny laugh. I’ll never forget what she said: “the men of that church would never let a woman manage the church’s money.” And I was genuinely confused – why not? I may have been 8 or 10, but I could see that being treasurer only required two things. You had to be good at basic math. I was really good at math, but most of the other kids in my class who were good at math were girls. And two, you had to be responsible and honest – and that doesn’t have anything to do with gender either.

Now, my mother had no desire to be church treasurer – that was one more headache she didn’t need. But the fact that she couldn’t be church treasurer made me mad. It wasn’t fair didn’t and it didn’t make sense. This was the early 1970s, and every time I heard someone say “girls can’t play sports” or “women can’t fly fighter jets” or “a woman can’t be President” I heard the men of that church telling my mother she couldn’t be treasurer, and I got mad all over again. I’ve always tried to do better over the years, because my mother taught me to respect women.

My mother showed me God.

My father like to talk about his religion (I may have inherited a bit of that). But my mother was no less devout, no less committed to her religion, to her faith, than he was, even though she didn’t talk about it. She just lived it.

I watched her care for my father’s mother in her final days. She did the same thing for her father, and then later when her mother got cancer. She nursed my father back from three heart attacks. She took care of my brothers when they couldn’t take care of themselves.

The church taught me about God the Father. She showed me God the Mother, loving her children unconditionally, and never ever turning her back on them. My mother showed me God.

My mother was a very private person, and not just with her religion. But sometimes, when it was just the two of us, she’d lower her guard and talk about her life and her dreams. When she was a little girl she wanted to be a missionary to China. She admitted she had no desire to be a missionary, but she wanted to go to China, and in the 1930s the only way anybody she knew got to China was as a missionary.

She worked as an airbrush artist, doing portrait reproductions in the pre-Photoshop era. She loved to draw and paint and she was very good at both. In a different time, under different circumstances, she could have gone to college, gone to art school, and become one of the most important artists of our time.

Or not – I don’t know if she would have wanted that. But in a better world she would had that opportunity.

When I think about the opportunities she didn’t have, it makes me mad. And it makes me feel guilty, because I know I’m one of the primary beneficiaries of the decisions she made, however freely or unfreely they were made.

In matters like these, at times like this, words are entirely inadequate. And also, words are all we have.

And so I offer these words: “thank you for being my mother.”

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