The most important lessons my mother taught me are the ones she wanted the world to take away from her memoir and her life. Eat First, Cry Later was her first-generation college alumna version of “when life gives you lemons, make lemonade”; “put your own oxygen mask on first,” and “never, ever, ever give up” all mashed into one.
For me my mother’s most important life lessons are:
- Make yourself resilient
- Take on hard things
- Remain open to love after loss
Make yourself resilient
The thing I lean on most in my mother – and her mother – is their ability to keep learning and to remake themselves, again and again, under the pressure of life’s unexpected complexities: illness, death, psychological and economic breakdown.
My mother anchored her resilience to the loss of her older brother in World War II. She remembered the sadness that enveloped her family home when they received the letter announcing that her brother had died. She sat at the top of the stairs, listening to her parents grieving, and she vowed to make them proud of her and happy again. Every resilient person has an anchor moment like this; these moments are not always conscious, but they are always there. Some people take them on as children; others gain this sense of purpose and persistence later in life. It’s the moment you shift from feeling “why is this happening to me” to “this is an opportunity to go deeper and to learn.” My mother was the first in her family to graduate from college, working three part-time jobs to pay for her books and clothes. She said that whenever college seemed overwhelming – and that happened often – she remembered the promise she’d made to herself at the top of the stairs, and that promise kept her going forward. You could feel that survivor energy in the way she talked about nearly everything: how she closed a big sale; how she connected with experts to figure out something new; how she kept her advertising business growing, when her husband died, and she was just 41 years old. No matter what, she bounced back. Even when she was depressed, she had this contagious energy and spirit to keep herself and others going forward.
Take on hard things
My mother was not afraid to challenge the status quo; she was an innovator and entrepreneur across the business and volunteer parts of her life.
When her first husband – my father – was diagnosed with cancer, she took over many of the outward facing parts of their business in addition to the in-house things she had always run. In the 1970s, for many people, she was the first woman they ever had to take seriously in business. She loved that challenge; it drove her creativity and her fierce competitive spirit, enabling her to grow the business she started with her first husband and ultimately sell it, 23 years later, for eight figures. In her non-profit life, she fought for the underdog, took on unpopular but necessary change, and helped many people. As vice chair and then chair of the Penn State Board of Trustees, she led the university in adopting the Sullivan Principles to force South Africa to end apartheid; she negotiated between the Gay Student Alliance and the university in adopting equal rights and benefits for the partners of gay members of the community; and she supported with seed funding countless new businesses and fund-raising projects to get new ideas off the ground.
Remain open to love after loss
My mother lost her first two husbands – one to a long battle with cancer and one to a sudden heart attack. Her third marriage ended in a contentious divorce that unleashed her depression and anxiety in the process of unraveling and getting herself free. “Two out of three,” she smiled, “that gets me into the hall of fame.”
What most strikes me in my mother’s life journey is how she navigated grief and remained open to new possibilities after those tragic losses of two men who loved her exactly as she was – “warts and all,” as my father would have said. Those losses took a toll on her body: she survived two different cancers, and a third one is likely to take her out before this newsletter is published. But her childlike innocence, her willingness to try new things and love new people will endure long after she is gone. She is still doing that today, in and out of consciousness, still trying to solve the life choices she regrets, lacking in the spiritual anchors that helped her parents and ancestors through the challenges of immigration, establishing life and family in new places, with few resources and treated as less than equal because of their religious and economic status. She let none of those things hold her back – not in business, and not in life. I would have liked her to have softer edges, to be more forgiving of others’ complexities and imperfections, but her willingness and ability to love – including the eighteen months she and I spent completing her memoir and opening what we loved and respected in one another – lives on in everyone she ever loved. She was very capable of loving friends and strangers alike.
As I wrote this, it felt more and more like a eulogy. Is there someone you love who is an elder or close to death or who has recently died? What are the three things that you value(d) and (will) miss most in them? For each of those lessons you remember and revere, what are moments from that person’s life that created the lesson and the feelings around it for you?