Linda Gage 1935 – 2014
(A Eulogy by Linda’s Son, Rick Gage)
Los Alamos, NM May 25, 2014
Over the last couple of years mom had lots of time to think about and help us plan her memorial services. And she did love to plan. For her in the process of planning she would have the anticipated experience almost as completely as if it was actually happening. So she planned and re-planned and re-planned. It was her way of trying to take care of us all after she’d be gone. Some of her suggestions were perfect and have shaped the time we have together today.
Some of mom’s thoughts were not as useful. Her primary advice about the eulogy was “don’t make it about me”. Really mom, are you hearing yourself? How am I going to do a eulogy about you without talking about you?
And I knew what she meant. As in her whole life, she wanted to point us to the Divine shepherd. We cannot remember and honor her without recognizing that spiritual center of her life. And we are also here to speak of her life, to grieve the separation we feel now that she is no longer here on this planet as she had been since Dec 28, 1935. She breathed her last on May 22nd, 2014.
As I have reflected on and tried to think of how I can capture the essence of her life, I would say Linda (my mom) was a woman of unshakable faith and natural loving compassion.
She was born Linda Lou Helene Lane, daughter of Paul and Dorothy Lane.
She called her parents mommy or momma and daddy throughout her life.
And that was one of several things about my mother that were a bit different from most people. She retained a childlike innocence throughout her life.
Linda and Lila, her precious sister, were raised in rural, upstate New York. They lived most of their early years in what they fondly described to us as “the little white house”. I can remember it clearly because my grandparents were still living there when I was a young boy. The setting was rural and while her parents weren’t really farmers, they were avid gardeners and the girls grew up with animals – close to nature and lots of extended family. The tight knit community of a small Seventh Day Adventist church outside Owego played a vital role in shaping the young women they both became. When they went off to Atlantic Union College they each married ministers. And they each became ministers in their own right.
The girls were close in age, but Linda was always the older sister and both girls fully embodied their sibling roles. The two of them have shared an unbreakable bond throughout their lives. I don’t know of any two human beings whose hearts were more closely connected. It seemed as though mom delayed her departure from this life in part to support her sister through critical heart bypass surgery less than two months ago. When mom and Aunt Lila had their first full phone conversation after the surgery, mom fretted all night with worry that she hadn’t told Lila that “everything would be OK”. And she felt like she’d really let Lila down, because she told me “that was the big sister’s job”. Mom was so relieved in the morning when Melodie who had been listening in on the speakerphone to the call the night before could tell mom “yes, you did – I heard you tell Aunt Lila that everything would be ok”.
Her faith was the very core of her – and everything about her flowed from that source. She had an uncommon perspective on life. For most people what we can physically sense is the most real to us. It takes faith to believe in something we can’t hear, see, smell, taste or touch. For her it was the opposite. The unseen world was the most real – the mind and the senses could be fooled but her deep heartfelt knowing of her relationship with Jesus was her bedrock. For her the deepest reality was always the spiritual.
One of the things she loved most in her life was the power of words to unlock the heart and free the soul. It’s completely fitting that her favorite book of the Bible starts with the sentence “In the beginning was the Word”. Both Jesus and language were so important to her. Whether her favorite Bible stories, the healing words of forgiveness, or the encouraging, kind words of unconditional love – she savored words. She relied on words to express her inner world and heal her outer world.
She was a brilliant woman who had nearly perfect grades throughout her education which continued after college and well into her 50’s. She earned both bachelors and masters degrees. Her career was important to her.
She was a trailblazer. For most of her life her calling to be a spiritual leader wasn’t recognized as a career for the women in her world. As a pastor’s wife she was every bit the minister my father was. She fought her whole life for the acknowledgement of the spiritual leadership role of women.
She kept a letter she once wrote to a church leader who had addressed a large group of pastors and their wives as “brethren” during an entire conference. She pointed out that nearly half of the group were not “brothers” and were disenfranchised and ignored by his language.
When mom and Melodie assembled the photos that would be shared in her memorials, it was really important to mom that we include several that showed her as pastor and counselor – including a photo of the time she was finally able to perform a baptism.
While her mind was keen, what people remember most about her was the expression of her loving heart. Mom approached all of her interactions and relationships with a deeply rooted caretaking compulsion. She couldn’t turn it off. Her unconscious drive was always to support everyone else.
She was a mother and grandmother to everyone. She was the safe place that so many over the years have found to confide their deepest sadness, fears and shame. She had a healing presence that lifted anyone around her.
One of her closest friends whom she met in her 30’s said “Linda taught me how to love”.
There has never been a time in my life when my mom was not connecting with new people who became part of our extended family which now must number in the hundreds. There were always several new family members who were a focus of her attention and these relationships were for her – always intended for eternity. More often than not, they were beautiful, amazing people who felt like no one else saw them as she did. She saw with Divine eyes the preciousness that lay quietly behind the stories of troubled lives that were shared with her.
I want to mention the story of one young woman who became part of our extended family when we lived in Loma Linda and I was about 12. I don’t know the details of Lucy’s story, I don’t need to. She had profound arthritis that racked her body with pain. She’d had a tough life already in her early 20’s. She moved to Walla Walla not long after our family did and stayed connected with mom throughout her life which lasted much longer than any of the doctors had predicted. Lucy became in her own way a powerful inspiration to many. She rests now in the gravesite next to where my mom will be buried next week. I mention Lucy’s story because it is the story of an amazing person who blossomed, in part, because of her relationship with my mom. And I mention her story because she is an example of the many, many lives that my mother touched in her unique way.
And you couldn’t help but pour your heart out to her. And she was absolutely trustworthy to hold it gently and with loving kindness. I can remember a family member getting off the phone with mom and saying something like “she got me again. I wasn’t going to tell her about that . . . but it just came out”. I think over the years many people were able to say to her what they couldn’t say to anyone else. And there was such healing in that for all of us.
This life-long pattern continued and even intensified in the last two years. She has been visited and supported by so many of the members of her extended family. Connections she’d made over her lifetime were refreshed and renewed. She had closure with dozens and dozens of the people she held most dear.
And she was wonderfully supported by the angels of the Los Alamos hospice community who grew to love her and be loved by her.
Melodie and I have been privileged to witness countless lives lifted by their encounters with the mother we shared with the world.
Mom wanted our time together in the memorial to support all of us in our grieving. Melodie and I have noticed that we could easily fall into our mother’s life pattern and approach these services as a way that the two of us could carry on her work and focus on supporting all of you. It’s what we learned from the powerful teaching of her example. It comes pretty naturally for us. We have a much harder time, as our mother did, letting others support us.
So, to allow this time to also lift those of us who were my mom’s support system I have to share some things that I notice are hard for me to say to you. But if I don’t say them then I know that I’ll hold them behind a little wall inside me that will keep me from fully letting in your love and support. So here goes . . .
The experience of my mom in short doses that most of you have had over the years was quite different from being part of her ongoing support system. Not because she was different behind closed doors. She was pretty much the same all the time. But she wasn’t great at setting limits and taking care of her own needs. She was deeply imprinted with the value of selflessness. She walked in her mother’s footsteps and gave more energy and time than her body could handle again and again and again. Some of my earliest memories are needing to keep quiet because mom was sick again and of a darkened room where my mom was recovering from yet another migraine.
To the end she couldn’t be convinced to call out in the night when she needed help. Even when we made clear that her stubborn refusal to do so meant that someone had to stay at least partially aware all night – listening for her movements so we could anticipate her unspoken needs.
My mother has always been an emotional paradox for me. She possessed the incredible strength rooted in her unshakable faith. She felt absolutely trustworthy on many levels. But she also felt fragile – weary and weighed down. I remember a time when I was an overwhelmed young dad with two daughters under the age of three. She came to tell me that she and dad had decided to go their separate ways. I had a rare moment of watching an unfiltered visceral reaction escape my lips before I could control it. I just blurted out “well, I can’t take care of you” – exposing the deep belief I held that she required a care taker. She shot right back with uncharacteristic bluntness “who asked you?” Shortly after we laughed together at the revealing and memorable exchange.
Despite her constant weariness, as Emily’s poem describes, she was infuriatingly happy all the time. She was an irrepressibly positive person who could effuse day after day about each meal being the best she’d ever eaten – the best in the whole world. It was her truth of the moment and it didn’t occur to her that she may have said the same thing yesterday.
She found great delight in each sunrise, each flower and each small present given to her. Greeting cards were one of her favorite things. She would savor the words – printed ones, double and triple underlined for emphasis and most of all hand written words from the heart. They were her deepest treasures and over the last two years she had the chance to return to the many boxes of them and experience them all over again. Particularly over these last few months as she struggled through the indignities of a declining body – this constant happiness felt incongruous and out of place.
But because her deepest reality has always been the unseen, her world really was a pretty wonderful place. Her inner world remained largely untouched by the frailties of her body. In her walk with Jesus, there was a profound and transformative peace that passes understanding.
Mom and I have a lot in common. My mannerisms are probably more like my dad, but the core of me, my heart is rooted in her heart. Words are also important to me and the words which unlock my experience of the Divine are different from the ones that she held so deeply. That was hard for us for many years. I felt her pain that I did not seem share the walk with Jesus that was so dear to her. I hated being the source of that pain for her, but I wouldn’t fake it with her.
Our relationship was still strong and our love for each other was never in doubt. This difference seemed to fade and become much less significant over the last 10-15 years. It felt like she’d come to least partially accept my path. While I didn’t feel like she worried about my soul as much, I still felt a gap between us that I couldn’t cross or heal. I had released that as something that would be healed in heaven.
Just three weeks before her passing in what would be our last real discussion, we were gently touching this topic again, as we had so many times before. Her words now came very slowly and there were long pauses when I was tempted to think she’d drifted back to sleep. With her eyes still closed in a voice barely audible she said of our different ways of expressing our spiritual experience “maybe we could just meet on the plain of mystery”. Oh yes, my precious mother, I can meet you there. It was such a wonderful, unexpected healing for me and for her. A last profound gift in a lifetime of gifts.
I want to close with a phrase from song that has echoed in my mind in the past few days. Some of her hymns which we listened to with her over these last years have also been playing in my mind, but this particular song comes from a famous musical with a one word title that couldn’t be more out of place in this eulogy.
I’ll use the slight paraphrase that has been playing for me as a song to my mother:
“We can say that we’ve been changed for the better.
Because we knew you,
We have been changed for good.”