Reflecting on our Eulogy
Four Siblings and their Mum
Our mother died six weeks before turning one hundred. As it transpired, this was one week before our first borders-slamming-shut COVID 19 lockdown. So, thankfully, her four children were able to gather from around the globe to keep vigil at her deathbed and deliver the eulogy at her memorial service.
In life, Agnes shunned the limelight. She lived her life with strong determination and a vibrant faith under the shadow of our exuberant, joke-telling and well-known father. Hence, in death, we wanted to bring her out into the light. We wanted to honour her overcoming of shyness, her feistiness and courage, her devoted care for those in need and her open hospitality.
Agnes Playing Scrabble
Mum loved playing scrabble. Her scrabble-board was always at the ready for a game after dinner. But scrabble on its own would never do. Oh no, it needed to be accompanied by three sweet treats: licorice allsorts, dark chocolate and crystallised ginger.
So it was that, in contemplating an overall structure for her eulogy, we couldn’t go past the scrabble-board.
During her memorial service, as a lead-in to the eulogy, a Power-Point slide of a scrabble-board featured as the back-drop, primed with her name linked, Scrabble-style, down and across. Her sixteen great-grandchildren, supervised by her nine grandchildren, delighted the congregation by moving up and down the aisles passing around decorated baskets of the aforementioned Scrabble confectionery. So, the congregation was happily munching away and a relaxed tone was set as we strode up to the podium. With the four of us weaving in and out of the eulogy, it provided emotional reassurance that if one of us felt overwhelmed, another could take over.
As each theme of her life was highlighted, a seminal word was added to the Scrabble-board configuration until the entire board was covered. By the end, all present could appreciate the graphic depiction of her fascinating intrepid life: from her birth and early years in the Sudan to her childhood with senior aunts in South Australia; from travelling on the boat as a young nurse to India to falling in love with my father in Darjeeling; from working together in Bangladesh to finally settling with four children in New Zealand. They could see what made her tick – her sustaining faith, her devotion to family, her offering of accommodation and becoming a mother figure to people in need, her simple readily offered hospitality and her love of word games, especially Scrabble. They could appreciate that she certainly wasn’t perfect. She had her quirky, if not annoying, side, as in the humming of hymns under her breath when angry or her insistence upon arguing the finer point.
Our mother was not a scintillating raconteur. Nor was she a mover and shaker. Nonetheless, she lived life to the full. She influenced others in unassuming ways for lasting good, in her small corner of the world.
Lyn Pound