Growing up with Mom was something. You all know Mom and probably experienced her great sense of humor, her independent thinking, her love and acceptance. We kids and Dad experienced that, too. We loved Mom -- and sometimes she drove us crazy!!
Sometimes it seemed like Mom just had to say certain things, even when we had told her we didn’t like it. It was like she just could not help herself. A big one of these was her backseat driving. She was the quintessential example of the passenger who white-knuckled the door handle and pressed on the imaginary gas pedal. Some years ago, when my son Luke was learning to drive and I’m sure *I* was driving *him* crazy, I was driving us around in our minivan while on a visit to Lynden. Mom was in the front passenger seat doing her usual thing, pressing *her* brake way before I pressed the real one. I was studiously ignoring it and telling myself to stop letting it bother me. Then Mom said, “Isn’t it funny how some people put their foot on the brake at different times than other people?” And I turned to her and said, “No, Mom, it is not funny, not funny at all.” My son Luke, as you might imagine, found this to be hilarious.
In a story that Garrison Keillor tells, he talks of a woman who, he said, “narrated road trips,” reading aloud the signs as they went past. Well, Mom didn’t do that so much as pretend she was just casually reading the signs, but there was a definite message she was saying. Sometimes she’d kind of sing the signs, like “25 miles an hour”, “school zone”, and so on. Or she’d just breezily read aloud, “Stop sign here.” “Oh, there’s a person at the crosswalk,” “30 miles an hour.” Thanks, Mom.
Even Dad, who had the patience of a saint, sometimes grew quite frustrated with Mom and her backseat driving. Mom often said she saved their lives many times. That actually was probably true. Dad tended to enjoy the scenery as he drove, and sometimes as he turned his head in a direction to look at something, the steering wheel would follow suit. Mom probably did save their lives sometimes. All of us felt, though, that somewhere there must be a happy medium between constantly giving driving instructions so that maybe 1 out of 100 times, it was actually helpful.
We could count on Mom for advice. One favorite was if you told her you didn’t feel well. She’d say, "Eat an apple and drink a big glass of water." It's a good way to cure what ails you. I myself have this tendency of giving advice to people when they haven’t asked and might not welcome it. Mom was great at that, too. Here’s kind of a typical thing of Mom’s. When we bought our second house in San Jose, the one we live in now, I did not tell Mom for as long as possible that it came with a hot tub. My mom had a thing about kids and water. “Two inches,” she’d say, “that’s all it takes to drown a baby.” I finally had to tell Mom when they were going to come to visit that we had a hot tub. My next letter from Mom had an article enclosed named, “Are Hot Tubs Really so Hot?”
Along with that tendency of advice and instruction, and maybe the flip side of that, was that Mom cut to the chase on things and spoke the truth. She was not a timid, or intimidated woman. I often thought she was ahead of her time. She was independent both in thought and action. Back when Mom and Dad got married, she had her name on the checking account along with Dad’s, which was uncommon in that time. She proudly gave her name as Frances Burghgraef Kok, not Mrs. Louis E. Kok. Mom was a champion of women, modeling a marriage that was a true partnership, and a proponent of women in office. Dad loved Mom’s independent spirit.
And Mom was practical about it, not just theoretical. She liked to tell the story of speaking to a young couple receiving premarital counseling from my dad. She asked the future husband about loving his fiancee, “Do you love her enough to die for her?” Of course he said he did. Then Mom asked, “How about do you love her enough to do the dishes for her?”
Mom’s love of reading was formative for all of us kids. We got that love partially by osmosis. As time went on and we had a TV in our home, in the evenings, Mom and Dad would sit in the living room reading while us kids watched TV in the family room. She brought us to the library pretty much weekly. I remember her showing me many, many good books to read. Even before I could read, she would read to us. She read me the “Honey Bunch” books when I was small. I am so grateful to Mom for giving me that love of reading, a real source of joy in my life.
Mom not only read, she was a lifelong learner. She married Dad before completing college and then took college courses everywhere we lived during our life of constant moves with Dad’s Air Force career. The year I graduated from high school, Mom graduated from college with a Library Science degree. She became a librarian once she had that degree. I often think my mom worked my way through college.
Mom also loved theater. She volunteered for many years in the Queen Juliana theater here in Lynden, which became the Claire vg Thomas Theater. She loved doing PR work for try-outs, researching and getting the copyrights for plays, helping to pick the plays that would be shown. She loved being in the theater life, being friends with the other theater folks.
Mom was a social, friendly person. We often noticed that Mom had talkative, sometimes loud or outspoken friends. She loved being around people. Even at Meadow Greens, I sometimes would call and Mom wouldn’t be there. When I asked about her, Dad would say she was out sitting in the lobby -- it was Open House at the facility and she sat there watching as people came in, because she might know someone. There are many of you here today who visited Mom and we are all so grateful to you. Being with friends was a huge joy in Mom’s life.
Mom was a character. I could stand here and tell you story after story. But I’ll end with this memory, which some of you have heard before. When Dad was bedridden right before he passed away, each day at the Lynden Manor, we’d bring Mom into his room. Dad would say, “Move her closer, move her closer.” We’d put her wheelchair beside Dad’s bed and he’d put out his hand to hold hers and say, “Hi sweetheart.”
Dad saying, “Move her closer, move her closer” reminds me of The Last Battle by C.S. Lewis, where he describes the end of the world of Narnia. Aslan and the others said, “Come further up, come further in!” and “All their life in this world and all their adventures had only been the cover and the title page: now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story which no one on earth has read: which goes on forever: in which every chapter is better than the one before.” This is the hope to which we cling. Mom and Dad, with our brother Dan, and all our other loved ones, the clouds of witnesses, have gone before us to begin their real story, where we, too, will join them one day and truly live happily ever after.
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