Eulogy

Two years before she was Judy Carlson, my mother was a 37-year-old single mother of five who has unearthed a secret she was unauthorized to possess. What she did with that secret will tell you most everything I wish to convey today about my mother’s faith, her aspirations and her stubborn tenacity.

First you should know that my mom was good at stumbling upon secrets like the one I’m about to tell you about. Like most moms, she knew what we kids were into before we were into into whatever it was that she thought we were into. And when she didn’t know, she acted like she did anyway. She drew from an intelligence network of rumors, facts, remnants of facts, superstitions, hunches and yes, gossip.

It is in this way that my mother held the belief -- at least for many years -- that not only did Lee Harvey Oswald not act alone in killing JFK, but that that scoundrel Lynden Baines Johnson was behind the whole thing. She stood by her odd certainties. For example, my mother believed that cats -- the house cats we invite into our homes -- are actually spies sent by God, recording our lives to offer up their reports at Judgment Day. I'd watch our cats with their tails swinging, imagining their rear ends as tiny camera apertures, taking damning images of our sins. 

My mother's intelligence gathering was never keener than in matters related the church. She often knew, or at least pretended to know, the next bishop or stake president before they were called. It was in this way, through her sources, that she scored what journalists like myself would call a front-page scoop. 

The prophet of the church, Spencer W. Kimball, was planning to quietly sneak into Denver, but only for a matter of hours. Only the smallest group of high-ranking Mormon leaders in the region were party to the information. There would be no service for general membership, and even those attending were to not disclose he had been there. Had it been otherwise, large throngs of faithful would have gummed up the itinerary, flocking to the airport or hounding their leaders for access. Yet my mother knew the time and location of the meeting. She kept her secret to herself, in this way respecting the wishes of leaders who hoped for a discreet visit. 

But how she herself acted on that information points to her unsinkable hope for what at the time was very broken, feeble and beat-down family.

The Judith Yvonne Scott of 1976 was a woman in a state of profound crisis. Recently divorced from a third failed marriage, she was working night shifts at a 7-Eleven in a fruitless effort to cover her bills. Her ex-husbands provided little assistance. She was also largely estranged from her parents. The reasons for that were complicated, but her conversion to Mormonism was a leading factor.

Her children spanned in ages from 6 to 17. The older three sisters, all teenagers, stairstepped in age and varying degrees of rebellion, some in ways specific to the culture of 1970s. The younger two boys concentrated their need for attention and affection to one overburdened parent. 

It was this rough and ragged band that my mother wrangled together to catch a glimpse of a prophet who might never appear. My sisters confirm that there was considerable acrimony as she wrestled her brood into their Sunday best on a Saturday morning. But she prevailed, even as Stacy sulked in the back seat of whatever scrap heap of a car we drove that morning. 

I do not know fully what drove my mother, or what kept her aspirations afloat in the face of painfully conspicuous failures. Part of it, I suppose, is that same drive that propels all mothers to improve the lot for their children, even in the worst of circumstances.

Or maybe it was her Dust Bowl origins. She was born in Yakima, Washington at the tail end of the Great Depression 1939 to a working-class Oklahoma migrants. Her “daddy,” as she called him, was a tall, lanky and quiet sort, who drove trucks delivering livestock. Judy, a sort of tomboy, loved to ride along, quietly admiring a man who was as thrifty in conversation as in life. 

She was a romantic child, always with a nose in glamour magazines. Her thoughts trafficked in the realm of the privileged and famous. For years, she could recite the most minute personal details of the lives of Grace Kelly or Elizabeth Taylor. Perhaps the only thing in humble Yakima that captured her imagination was a large estate on the outskirts of the city called Congram’s Castle. She imagined the life inside its stone walls. Through her life, Congram’s Castle would symbolize her yearning for financial prosperity. My mother graduated high school in 1957, headstrong and confident of her future.

And yet, 18 years later, with five kids in tow on a trip to meet a prophet, she still hungered for rich tastes she could not afford. Still, as a provider she pulled off small miracles. Scouring garage sales and cobbling together second-hand castoffs, she outfitted her children and her home, and with surprising flair.

It was this strong-willed and mother who arrived with her kids at the chapel at 740 Hudson to sneak a peek at Spencer W. Kimball. As she arrived, my mother felt she had no right to park at the church itself, given that she was acting on information that she obtained illegitimately. So we stayed across the street, with a clear view of the building. Not wanting to stand on a sidewalk, she rung the nearest doorbell. Could we, she asked the woman who answered, spread out a blanket and sit on your front lawn for a few hours? The woman obliged, and so we sat, I imagine, with our crackers and snacks, and waited. 

Soon a motorcade of fancy black sedans arrived. We saw the prophet through the window, then saw him emerge later and walk a short distance into the building. And I suppose I may not have been alone in thinking that was it -- that we would gather together our blanket, get back in the car and resume our weekend. But mom stayed put. If it was worth, she must have thought, to gather your kids, get dressed up on Saturday and drive all this way to see the prophet once, it was worth waiting a few more hours to see him again. And so we did.

I marvel today at the faith of my mom at that particular time in her life -- the same way I marvel at so many others who, in joining the church, have lost friends, shed habits and conformed to a demanding new way of life. In my mother’s case, this kind of faith endured even when -- as my sister Shelley says -- it appeared to bear no fruits.

My mom joined the Church in 1960 in Alameda, Calif. She and her first husband had dabbled in missionary discussions for a time, but then dropped them. When the missionaries came knocking again one day, the couple tried to escape through the back door. And they would have made it, too, had my mom not broken her heel and returned for another shoe. The both of them were baptised. Within in a few years, they had three adorable young daughters. The pretty little Mormon family projected the Disney, middle-class ideal that fueled so much church growth at the time.

But behind the facade was decay. Her husband’s shady business transactions spilled over to lies and conflict within the marriage. They were divorced, and not long after my mother once again found herself in a second failed marriage. This one was so bad, so abusive and so brief that I personally did not know it happened until I was in middle school. 

Now twice divorced, she bought train tickets, loaded up the three girls and headed for Provo, Utah. She landed a job at the BYU bookstore and through the generosity of others -- including, coincidentally a home teacher named Stephen Covey -- she got back on her feet. It was here, she said recently, that she resolved to always stay true to the faith. It was also here that she was able to go to through the temple, a remarkable accomplishment for a divorced woman in the church at the time. In fact, it only occurred with the direct approval of General Authority Vaughn J. Featherstone. She was told at the time that she was very likely the first such divorced woman in the church to ever be granted such privilege. She was, as she wrote later, “the exception to all exceptions.”

It was in Provo that she would meet her third husband, a World War II bombardier 19 years older who swept her off to his family’s plantation in North Carolina. She followed him with expectations of Gone with the Wind and Southern refinement. What she was handed was remote farm stripped of its Antebellum glory. The marriage produced two boys, and together the family moved to Colorado. But that marriage, too, collapsed under arguments and conflict.

Once again she was single. Once again she had fallen short of her Mormon ideal. And yet, Sunday after Sunday she would dress her kids for church at a time when divorced mothers drew judgmental stares and poisonous gossip. I wonder if that’s why we so often occupied a side pew, near the back the chapel.

I wonder as well if, on that day she brought us to see the prophet, that she kept the family across the street. I wonder if she yielded that distance out of a feeling of inadequacy and not measuring up. After a long wait that day, the prophet reemerged from the church building. And this is where this story takes on its significance. 
Seeing our ragtag family across the street, the prophet not only waved to us, but waved for us -- signalling us across the street. We came to him. In the minutes that followed, he patiently and personally shook each of our hands, talking to us one-by-one. To my brother Marc and I, he said we would someday serve missions. To my sister Stacy, he said simply, “It will be okay. Everything will be okay.” I do not know, but have long wondered, what words he shared with my mother. When our long greetings were over, seeing our camera, he ordered his first counselor, N. Eldon Tanner, to take our picture. It took a while for us to recover and head home.

I’d love to say this incident changed everything for my mother. It didn’t. But I do think of it as a kind of turning point. I’m struck, now that she has died at age 74, that this event came precisely in the middle of her life. And I suppose splitting her life in half this way makes sense. At the midpoint, I believe, the trials that were disassembling her family were peaking. Most everything about the second half of that life was about putting it back together.

It would be a joint effort. Less than two years after her encounter with the prophet, Judy would meet Terry Carlson. They met at a church dance my mom was chaperoning. He was accompanying a son who had come to Denver to study. Both brought failed marriages to the dance floor. Both shared differing accounts of love-at-first sight. Within weeks they were corresponding through letters. He sent a poem to her from Alaska, comparing their love to a fragile egg or embryo.

She wrote back in reciprocating tones that, even then, imagined their budding love taking root in the eternities. “If I could hold our love in my hand as if it were an object,” she wrote, “I would hold before me a thing of beauty, a thing of the cleanest, most fragile, most pure and most beautiful substance, yet a thing with the strength of eternity -- the strength to endure eternal worlds.”

They married in a living room of a friend’s house. Terry got a job paying $900 a month. Terry threw my brother and I into sports, he wrestled with us, teased us and pestered us. More importantly, he sought to live the Mormon ideal of a priesthood holder that the three men before him had not. Their marriage wasn’t perfect. None is. My mother can could stubborn and difficult at times. She had a temper and struggled with depression. 

Thinking of her on Christmas, my brother and I took $12 to JC Penney that year to buy her the best gift we could afford. We stumbled upon a table of mood rings, which were popular at the time. The stones purported to change color with your mood. How perfect, I thought. Of all the moms in the world, who needed to regulate her mood more than mine? She’d put on the ring, I thought, and just when she was about to get upset at us for something, that stone would warn her to back off. Sadly, she never wore it past Christmas day. When she’d get mad or lose or cool, I’d think: ”Why doesn’t she just wear that ring?”

A year after my mom and Terry were married, they had their marriage sealed in the temple. My brother and I were also sealed to them that year; the sisters would follow suit later on. I remember, even as a young child, feeling that as we gathered around that altar that our family was being put back together, and in some way made legitimate.

In truth, in the immediate years that followed, it could feel like we were coming apart at times just as quickly. Some of the challenges that my older sisters faced would take years to sort out. But they did sort out. And much of that is owed to the fact that through it all, my mother was unmovable. She stood her ground with her beliefs in the Gospel and did not budge. And through whatever her children put her through, she loved them.

The family’s finances would always be a challenge. Jobs would come and go. Cars would smoke, burn and die. They passed through a series of rental homes, some of them in surprisingly decent neighborhoods, given the budget. One house on 404 Toledo, was actually sinking, one end several inches lower than the other. Shelley and her husband Dan were married in that house, at the low end of course, so guests at higher elevations could see

My mother worked hard through these years, moving from job to job. She cut hair. She did receptionist work. She even rose to a decent position at Denver's largest radio station. One morning she was the only employee who could get to work during a blizzard. So it was her voice that improvised the morning drive time commute for hundreds of thousands of listeners. She lacked higher education. But she adorned her home with books. She read every day I knew her, mostly historical fiction about royalty, or true crime. She cultivated soil fertile enough for her children to seek an education and a better life. 

Eventually, my parents managed to buy their first home together. But very quickly, they had to let go of it due to unemployment. At about that time, I remember thinking that if I wanted to use the car for prom, I might think about parking the car a half mile away so it wouldn’t be repossessed.

But amid all this, my mother sent her two sons on missions. And when options ran out in Denver, they packed up and headed for the Pacific Northwest. Terry got a job at Boeing. They settled together as empty nesters for the first time on Bainbridge Island, Wash., in a tiny cottage congregated on all sides by massive homes. So often, she lived across the street from prosperity.

When the job at Boeing dead-ended, the two of them resourcefully reinvented themselves as caregivers to the elderly. It was hard work done at a late phase in their life. But they tapped into a wealthy and powerful clientele. For some time, they cared for the former governor of Washington state, Albert Rosellini, and his wife -- occupying the lower level of their Frank Lloyd Wright estate. Later, my parents opened their own home for the elderly here in Bend, Oregon.

Then, at a point when my mother might have finally found a restful reprieve from a difficult life, she and Terry decided to serve a full time mission. They were sent across the world to South Africa. It was hard, toilsome work, tending to some of the world’s most abandoned people in the nation’s townships. These were mean and potentially dangerous streets. But in them,Terry and Judy found the Lord’s children. She loved those oppressed people of South Africa in no small part, because she knew suffering. And she served them despite tremendous medical challenges. Incredibly, many of her teeth were removed improperly by an incompetent South African dentist. Later, she suffered a serious stroke, and yet completed her last two months in a wheelchair.

The stroke denied her mobility. It slowed her speech. This was a profound loss, one that kept her on the margins of conversations she used to lead. It limited her ability to talk to distant children on the phone. And yet, she again expressed her unweilding faith by agreeing a year later to serve a mission, this time in Jackson, Mississippi. 

When that was through, she returned here again to Bend. Her daughters and son-in-laws took whatever small savings my parents had left and rebuilt a double-wide trailer for them on my sister Stephanie’s property. It is not the home she dreamed of. But it is paid for and cozy and well decorated. If there were an international competition for best $12,000 dwelling, it would win. In the bathroom hangs an image, drawn by her daughter, of Congram’s Castle, that unobtainable mansion of her childhood.

In a life of uprootings and relocations, this is where she landed. Here in Bend is where she has lived out the pernicious progression of strokes and seizures. She has endured it with the tireless support of those near to here in Bend. People like those who fill this room, people like my sisters, perhaps especially her closest neighbor, Stephanie.

Those who knew my mother best, can attest to a gentleness and a mellowing that defined the last phase of her life. It was a coming to terms with the tempests of her past. It was a sanctification. So much so, that on Sunday, in the middle of a long conversation, she told her daughter Stacy to gather up all her Pepsi. Seventy four years of addiction this this benign vice was making her guilty. She wanted to quit “cold turkey.” 

These final years, months and days have fortified that most important relationship as well, her eternal union with Terry. I’ll approach this part with care. I won’t pretend to know the joys and struggles that my mom and Terry shared in those final months. I won’t pretend to weigh Terry’s burdens as he tended to his ailing companion. Things were shared between them that should sacredly stay between them. This much, Terry will say. Those final four months of her life, those days of her greatest vulnerability and struggle, were among the best days of their earthly marriage. They would fall asleep each night holding hands.

On Monday morning, she turned to him after breakfast and said, “I know this is getting hard for you.” He assured her it was not, that caring for her was his mission. A few minutes later, laying on the couch, she reached out her hand to him, and was gone.

And so it is that on this day, Judith Yvonne Carlson has managed to once again wrangle together those she loves best. We gather -- just like my brother and sisters did 38 years ago -- on a Saturday, dressed in our Sunday best, to play out this last mortal exercise.

She has brought her children to her, this one last time, Stephanie, Stacy, Shelley, Marcus and Matthew. And this great matriarch gathers to her her grandchildren as well - both those here and distant. Ashley, Nick, Brianna, Brody and Gabe; Tiffany, Lee, Luke, Buck, Beau and Abe; Josh, Emily, Rebecca, Jake and Katie; Abbie, Ethan, Miles, Owen and Lydia; Sadie, Max, Lily and Jack. She reaches also to Terry's children and grandchildren. And she calls to the growing list of her great grandchildren. She calls as the pioneer of the family’s faith. She calls not just to those who still live that faith, but to us all. For she loved us all, every last one

And so we say goodbye, for now, knowing that her Savior calls to her to join Him. He calls her as surely as His prophet did nearly 40 years ago. Come, He is saying, and be by my side. Get up off that blanket and cross that street. You don’t belong on the other side. You never did. Come and inherit all that I have. Come now, ahead of the others. They will follow you. They have done it before. Come, at long last, and enjoy the fruits of your faith. Come and feast in the mansions of my mercy.