Eulogy for Joan D. Hill (October 15, 1951 - February 11, 2020)

Today, Valentine’s Day 2021, marks the one year anniversary of my mother’s funeral. Below is the eulogy I delivered for her. Click here to view her obituary.

I want to start with a number: Five thousand two hundred and twenty nine. It’s not a number you hear all the time. But it’s the number that Mom happened to use when referring to how many things she had to do:

“I’ve got 5229 things to do before school starts.” Or: “I’ve got 5229 things to do before we can go to Saint Croix.” Or: “I’ve got 5229 things to do to get ready for Christmas.”

So while it’s a little random, 5229 is a number I think of when I think of her.

There are words that describe her, that we can all associate with her, words like “selfless,” which she certainly was, and “humble” and “caring” and “loving” and “gentle,” which each of you knows she was, all the time, with every measure of her soul.

But I also think of words and phrases she used, that, when I hear versions of them out in the world, I am reminded of her.

One is the line, “You make my heart sing.” And another is, “I love you like craaaazy.” Those were lines she said to her five granddaughters whenever she saw them. And since her granddaughters were lucky to see so much of her, she got to say them often: “I love you like craaaazy.” And: “You make my heart sing.”

Another word she used that will remind me of her is the word “bizarre,” not because that describes her at all. It doesn’t. But it’s something she said in one block of time. 

In 2000, she suffered a heart incident while leading the induction of middle school students into the National Junior Honor Society where she worked. She stood up to begin proceedings, and just collapsed. Her heart stopped for twelve minutes, her life saved by members in the audience who performed CPR before she was rushed by helicopter to the hospital where she stayed in a coma for almost three days. When she first woke, she was confused and disoriented. By the time I returned to the hospital, Dad had tried—about five thousand two hundred and twenty nine times—to explain what had happened, but her short term memory was so bad she could only repeat the same refrains: “This is so bizarre to me.” “What happened?” “This is so bizarre to me.” Over and over, with no variation, and no comprehension. That was a frightening time for all of us, but once she fully recovered, the word “bizarre” sort of took on the role of levity, a reminder that, after all that darkness, we could still find some light.

Her favorite source of light in the world, aside from family, is an island in the U.S. Virgin Islands. Saint Croix was her safe space, her happy place, a focal point. During her first battle with cancer in 1987, she focused her mind on steady waves rolling over rocks down at the far end of Grapetree Beach.

When she and Dad weren’t in Saint Croix, enjoying the beach and trying the newest restaurants, back at home, Mom was a tremendous cook. 

In her typical manner of self-depreciation and moderate hyperbole, she remarked to me, when I got married, that when she married my dad she didn’t even know how to boil water. I make most of the dinners for my family and I’m pretty sure I—also—actually didn’t know how to boil water when I got married. So, I’m my mother’s son. 

But her culinary skills are preeminent.

Anyone who has dined at my parents’ house—especially for a holiday dinner on Thanksgiving or Christmas, but even for a birthday or an end-of-softball-season team dinner—knows how incredibly tasty and extensive those meals could be. So much food! All made not out of duty or obligation but purely for her love of celebrating with friends and family.

Here’s an example: Thanksgiving in 2015 was an unusually small affair. My brother Eric and his family were with his in-laws, and my wife was on call at the hospital. Other family happened to be other places. My parents’ only guests were me and my daughters, then a four-year old and a one-year old. Along with turkey, Mom made nine different side dishes. Basically just for me and Dad! And that doesn’t include an entire table of appetizers, multiple homemade pies and homemade ice creams—plural—that became the hallmarks of her Thanksgiving spreads, often for a dozen or more guests.

But her biggest talent with cooking was mostly hidden from everyone but my father. Every night she prepared for him healthy, creative, aesthetically beautiful, dinners. And, incredibly, each night was a brand new meal. 

Ask my dad to show you the pictures he felt he needed to take with his phone, to capture meals that like sunsets were each breathtaking, but never repeated.

What for many people is a drab daily routine of a day’s final meal, for Mom—and Dad—was a special event, delicious dishes, artfully created and gorgeously presented.

She was generous with more than her food. She was generous with her time and love. She cared for the students in her charge, from National Junior Honor Society seventh graders to students struggling with academics to middle schoolers like the boy living at home, calling my mom on our landline one winter night to ask her how to use a can opener and how to turn on a stove so he could fend for himself after his parents took off without him. I remember she fought with state services who had refused to help that boy because his situation wasn’t dire enough to warrant use of their limited resources.

“For such a sweet and gentle person, she was certainly a fighter,” my Dad said about her will to battle cancers. Her instinct to fight, combined, I think, with the constancy of the mantras she lived by, helped guide her and give her the strength she needed.

When she battled cancer the first time, in 1987, her mantra was, “I may not be a good mother for my sons. But I’m the only one they have.” The prognosis for her survival was very bad. Dad was advised to start thinking about how to raise his sons alone. But Mom wouldn’t accept negativity. Nor defeat. She survived.

Two other mantras that guided her life were to live it “one day at a time” and to believe that “everything happens for a reason.” 

I have to believe that her faithful adherence to those polestars helped guide her through the stresses and pitfalls of life.

Another thing that kept her spirits up was loudly playing vinyl records of Broadway musicals while cleaning the house. I’ve never seen Ben Franklin in Paris, nor Guys and Dolls, but I know those musicals pretty much by heart!

Maybe her favorite song to sing was, “My Favorite Things” from The Sound of Music. I remember her singing that Julie Andrews song to comfort me when I was little, or just randomly when she felt like singing. She loved listening to musicals. After all, to quote a different Julie Andrews song, “the Hills are alive with the sound of music.”

68 years is too short, of course. But she did a lot in that time:

She beat breast cancer two times. She raised two sons—my brother Eric and me. And she got to experience a number of places she really wanted to visit. She went to San Francisco and Napa Valley, New Orleans, and the restaurant Giada in Las Vegas, owned by her favorite celebrity chef and culinary hero Giada De Laurintiis. One of her favorite adventures with Dad was their visit to the Grand Canyon, which was her absolute dream to see. She described it over and over as a “trip of a lifetime.” And of course she spent a lot of time in Saint Croix, where she had been spending most school winter breaks and summer vacations since 1982.

One of her great personal accomplishments was hiking “The Beast” in Saint Croix. Saint Croix was, for many years, home to an official Ironman half-marathon. The reputed most difficult section of the entire race is the steep hill known as “The Beast.” Mom’s dream was to hike it on foot.

She planned to give it a go in twenty seventeen, but during that trip, she started to feel sick, so she abandoned plans to do it then. At the end of that trip, she was so sick she went straight from the airport to the hospital. She had to stay there for a couple days. In her mind, she feared she had missed her opportunity.

When she and Dad went back to Saint Croix next year, she went for it again. She had to re-train to get herself in good shape. She was ready. Dad drove her out before sunrise, and at 6:30 in the morning, she did it! She hiked “The Beast.” That was a huge accomplishment for her. And her smiles, bursting from the photos Dad took of her at the top of the hill, show how proud she was to do something gratifying for herself.

In her life, she was never an athlete until recently when she joined the Madison Senior Bocce League. She made close, new friends, and it gave her something fun to look forward to on a summer weekday morning. But that was the only time she was really on a competitive team. For those of us, like Eric and me, who grew up with Mom and Dad taking us to swim lessons and soccer and hockey and baseball and football and golf and basketball and lacrosse practices, team sports are part of life. That Mom finally got to be a part of a team like that is really special. I’m thrilled she got that opportunity.

Mom worried, when she retired from Haddam-Killingworth Middle School, where she’d been a guidance counselor for 27 years, that retirement would bore her. But her retirement happened to begin just months before the birth of my daughter Louisa, the first of five granddaughters, who call her “Grammie.” After Louisa came my brother Eric’s, and his wife Melissa’s, first daughter, Avery. Then my daughter Georgia, my niece Harper and my daughter Beatrice. 

She raised only boys. She was prone to say, jokingly, “Even the dog is a boy.” So for her to be able to dote on and brag about, and obsess over her five precious granddaughters was certainly her favorite thing.

She loved them like crazy. Now their little hearts will have to sing without her.

Mom, thank you for your love and patience and compassion and strength. Thank you for your guidance. For being a role model. For your culinary gifts. Thank you for the memories we cherish, the songs that make our hearts sing.

Cancer has stolen, from my nieces, and my daughters—and all of us—and her—more of the gift of her life that—compared to the average life expectancy for a woman in the United States—should have been extended by some fourteen years.

Or as she might have said, by about five thousand two hundred twenty-nine...days.