(Speech given at Nancy's memorial)
When I started thinking about what I was going to say to you today, the sentence that came out first was, “I just loved her so much.” And for a long time, that was it, the shortest eulogy ever written. In the end, I decided that I wanted to say more than that, but while I’m using more words, I don’t know that I’ll be introducing any new ideas. Nancy Dauterman was my mother, and I just loved her so much.
My mother had a heart the size of a planet. She had a particular way of loving things; intense, thoughtful, and perfectly gift-wrapped. It made my sister and me very lucky to be her children, but it also made her students lucky to be her students. I think children understood the size of her heart, instinctively, and responded to it. They loved her, and she adored them. Every child she nannied was, at one point or another, her cellphone background. That’s how much she loved being their Mimi.
My mom’s capacity for love was matched only by her deep attention to the things and people that she loved. She knew I was a writer before I did, and patiently supported me as I tried and failed to be many other things first. She loved when I started writing plays, and I would only send her a script if she promised not to send it to anyone else, a promise that she broke every single time.
Every spring, my mom would send me a text the first time she saw peonies for sale at Trader Joe’s. She decorated her home with seashells or crocheted snowflakes, bringing a sense of changing seasons to a place where the weather never dips below 70. She loved heart-shaped rocks, sea glass and driftwood, cute little bowls, well-made greeting cards, the tops of acorns, and the perfect coffee mug. She had an innate understanding of how to bring joy into the world, and she cultivated that joy like the sweet peas she used to grow in our backyard.
She was whimsical, and believed in the act of celebrating. When we were kids, she served us green milk for St Patrick’s Day, and one time I put a tooth under my pillow and woke up with a hula hoop, somehow, underneath me. We had doughnuts for breakfast on our birthdays, but she made sure we ate them with eggs and a couple of sausage links, which, if you’ve never tried, is a really good way to eat doughnuts.
My childhood is absolutely littered with memories like that, so sweet that they hurt your teeth. I can only think about them for short flashes before they overwhelm me. The autumn trips to Disneyland, where the first person to catch sight of the Matterhorn from the freeway would win a quarter. Or the summer vacations spent at the Mir-a-Mar in Santa Barbara, where she once brought a book of different braided hairstyles, and every photo of me featured a wetsuit and a pair of Princess Leia buns. Perfect moments that took on a very different feeling a few months ago, when the world around us became deeply, catastrophically imperfect.
In and amongst my grief, I’ve found myself needing to look for gratitude, as if my mother is still reminding me to. And sometimes it felt like I was dumpster diving in order to do so, but I found some. I’m grateful that we got as much time as we did, when two types of cancer and a stroke shadowed her throughout her life. And I’m grateful that we truly made the most of the time we had. When she was first diagnosed with melanoma, we were talking on the phone once every week or two. Afterward, we spoke three times a week, for an hour or longer, for the next three years. We Facetimed so she could watch me play with my foster cats. I put her on speakerphone and made dinner at 9pm. I told her I was falling in love with my boyfriend a solid year before I told him, sorry Josh. I wish my mom never had cancer, but if she had to have it, then I’m glad she had cancer in a way that led to hundreds of extra phone calls between us.
I’m also grateful that I got to spend two of her final weeks with her, first at UCSF, where this began, and then in Arroyo Grande, where it ended. We had so much fun in San Francisco that she later referred to it as “our hospital party.” We watched the Olympics. I sent her photos of any flowers I saw on my walks back to my hotel. You wouldn’t have known all the bad news we’d gotten, to see us chatting over hospital mashed potatoes. My mom was taking it one day at a time, and I was just happy to be with her.
I flew home, grateful that my sister, sister-in-law, and aunt were able to take turns visiting her. I became very grateful for my job’s remote work policy while devising a plan to move to Portland with my mom, when it seemed like we might have years. That morphed into a plan to drive my cat and my work computer out to California, when it seemed like we might have months. Each plan more slapdash and heartbreaking than the last, and each revealed, eventually, as far too optimistic. By the time I flew out to California again, once she’d entered hospice care, I had well and truly run out of things to be grateful for.
A friend’s mother once told me, “your mom is the bravest person I know,” and it took me until last month to realize how right she was. My mom faced down her choices so calmly. She had told me, in San Francisco, that she was okay if the worst came, because it wasn’t like her brush with ovarian cancer decades ago: this time, she knew her children would be okay, and it made all the difference to her.
I, for my part, was not brave, much less “okay”. I never cried in front of her, and I rarely did anything but cry when I was away from her. We talked, and I realized that, for the first time in my life, I didn’t know what to say to her. By the end, she slept, and I sat on the floor next to her bed, pricking up my ears when she turned over, and baring my teeth at any noise. For a few days there, I was in danger of going absolutely feral.
But you can’t have the kind of life my mother had without being truly loved by the people who know you. I could have sworn there was no right thing to say, and then your birthday cards started arriving, and I learned that there are a lot of right things to say. I was so humbled by you, by how well you expressed your love, by how well you knew her, from sending her poems by Mary Oliver to mentioning how well Kamala did in the debate. Right when I was really trying to lean into despair, your love was there for us.
You want to know what love looks like? My sister-in-law, calling radiologists and updating Google docs. Who took the next week-long shift at my mother’s side, after I flew home, just as if she was my mom’s third daughter, because she always has been. My dad, who, after being divorced for, like, twenty-five years, took the morning shift at her bedside, reading her David Sedaris and Garrison Keiller.
You want to know what love looks like? My aunt Amy, who helped oversee my mom’s medical information and her son’s black-tie wedding. Simultaneously. And who could always make her smile. Or my aunts Sue and Cathy, who sent music and photos to my mom, and words of comfort and encouragement to me.
You want to know what love looks like? Hayley Chapman Anne Dauterman. My sister was there to coordinate my mom’s care, her bills, her friends, and her cat sitter. My sister, who used every Clinical Psychology trick in the book to help my mom relax. She was indomitable, because she knew that her support made my mom feel safer, and because I lied to you before. My mom is not the bravest person I know, she raised the bravest person I know.
In her final days, we read my mom her text messages, playing the songs and showing her the photos you sent, and I loved that I wasn’t the only person who sent her pictures of beautiful flowers. On my last day with her, I played Joni Mitchell’s album “Blue,” front to back, in part to drown out the sound of her roommate’s TV. But her friends had been sending her Joni Mitchell and James Taylor songs for days. Even if I hadn’t been there, she would have gotten the right lullaby.
I kept wanting to fall apart. I kept wanting to feel lost and alone. But you jerks wouldn't let me, because you loved my mother so well that it made me downright joyful. My mom had a particular way of loving things, and it has been the surprise of my life, to feel that kind of love, coming from every person, in every direction, right when I was certain I would never feel it again. I know that my mom taught me how to love like that, but I wonder if maybe she taught all of us.
Nancy Dauterman was my mother, and I just loved her so much. And she just loved you so much. And I am so, so glad that you got to be loved by a person like her. Thank you.
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