<\/p>\n
My mother died on June 30. <\/span><\/p>\n It is hard to write those words, even harder to Marcia Hochstedt lived humbly. <\/span>There might be a small notice in the Arizona Republic<\/i> citing her birth and She was born during the Great Depression to working And that was my mother’s creed: <\/span>We may not have much, but there is Mom’s Methodist church reinforced this creed. <\/span>My mother’s parents were not My mother took it very seriously. <\/span>Not only did she endlessly give things Throughout her life, she loved politics and saw the My mother was not, by any means, perfect. <\/span>I do not want, through the mists of In many ways, my mother was the 20th<\/sup> Marcia Hochstedt was a good person who died rather Thanks, Mom. I hope there is baseball–with no Yankees–in heaven. <\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" My mother died on June 30. It is hard to write those words, even harder to post them. But part of dying is the practice of the public memorial, spoken words in eulogies and written ones in obituaries. After death, words communicate joy and grief, appreciation and contribution. Words are memory. And I would…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":66,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-27","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-christian-living"],"yoast_head":"\n
\npost them. <\/span>But part of dying is
\nthe practice of the public memorial, spoken words in eulogies and written ones
\nin obituaries. <\/span>After death, words
\ncommunicate joy and grief, appreciation and contribution. <\/span>Words are memory. <\/span>And I would like to offer here a public remembrance of my mother.<\/span><\/p>\n
\ndeath, but no lengthy article claiming a lifetime of achievement. <\/span>She was neither rich nor famous. She did not go
\nto college, see the world, or have cosmopolitan tastes. She was a regular person, the kind of person that politicians say they know, understand, or work for. I do not particularly
\nthink my mother would have liked being called “regular” or of humble circumstance, but
\nthere you have it. <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n
\nclass parents in Baltimore. <\/span>Her
\nearliest memories of life were of deprivation. <\/span>When she was very small, her father, who worked at
\nWestinghouse, won a refrigerator at the company Christmas party. <\/span>Before it could be delivered, however,
\nthe Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and the new refrigerator was commandeered by
\nthe military as scrap metal. <\/span>Her
\nfamily, like pretty much everyone else in their urban neighborhood, made due
\nwith the icebox until 1950 or so.
\n<\/span>Mom often spoke of Victory gardens and tin drives, of giving food to
\ntruly poor people who begged at their door and helping out at the USO. <\/span>She always said, “We may
\nnot have had much, but we always had enough to share.” <\/span>That was, of course, because her mother
\noften went without food to feed her children and the beggars at the backdoor.<\/span><\/p>\n
\nalways enough to share. <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n
\nparticularly religious–her father was a freethinker-atheist and her mother
\nrejected the Catholic Church in favor of a sort of folk spirituality. <\/span>But a great-aunt partially raised my
\nmother–and Aunt Marcie was a devout Methodist, a feminist and temperance
\nactivist in the early 20th<\/sup> century–a passionate believer who wanted
\nan American and Christian share of justice for the poor, outcast, and
\nwomen. <\/span>Aunt Marcie’s church taught
\nmy mother that the Great Command to “love you neighbor as yourself” was the
\ncore of Christian faith.<\/span><\/p>\n
\naway (often, like her own mother, to the point of great personal sacrifice) but
\nstood up for social justice. <\/span>She was
\nthe only person among her family and friends to support the Civil Rights
\nmovement (and later, the feminist movement and, although hard for her, rights
\nfor LGBT people). <\/span>When her high
\nschool was integrated in the 1950s, my mother refused to boycott school on the day that
\nthe first black students came to class.
\n<\/span>Instead, she showed up to meet the bus and welcome her new classmates.<\/span><\/p>\n
\npolitical process as a way to enact the Great Command. <\/span>Oddly enough, she was never terribly cynical
\nabout politics, choosing instead to believe that good people would act on the
\nbehalf of justice for all. <\/span>Her
\npolitics were laced with pointed jokes and Elvis tunes. <\/span>She campaigned for John F.
\nKennedy. <\/span>She went through a conservative
\nphase in the late 1970s and 1980s (which she regretted) and proudly boasted to
\nall her Republican neighbors in Arizona that she had voted for Barack
\nObama. <\/span>She would shake her head in
\nsorrow for what had been done to both the slaves in her native Maryland and
\nArizona’s indigenous peoples. <\/span>In
\nthe weeks before she died, she told me how angry she was that the governor of
\nArizona had signed that “terrible” anti-immigration bill saying that she would
\nboycott her own state if she did not live there!<\/span><\/p>\n
\nsadness or regret, to romanticize her.
\n<\/span>She was often hampered by her own ideals, her lack of pragmatism
\nconstantly inhibited her ability to make good decisions, had a quick temper with anything she perceived unfair, and she did not
\nunderstand anything about the darker hues of human nature. <\/span>Like many women of her time, she
\nmarried and had children too young and before she knew herself. <\/span>She was deeply skeptical of rich
\npeople–thinking money vaguely sinful. Her humble Methodism was
\nreinforced by her equal love of baseball, her real passion. <\/span>She believed that there were nine
\ninnings to play by the rules, that honest umpires maintained a fair game, and if you had the best pitcher and the best hitters, the good guys
\nwould always win (unless, of course, if you were the Yankees and could buy the
\nWorld Series). <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n
\ncentury American everywoman, a sort of “Jimmy Stewart-ish” Georgiana
\nBailey–there was not a Mr. Potter bone in her body. <\/span>Life, however, is not Hollywood and her closing scene was not
\nas rewarding as It’s a Wonderful Life. <\/span><\/i>Nobody really knew her story except
\nher family, some friends, and co-workers–and there was no rescue from difficulties at the
\nend. <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n
\ntoo young, but lived a life based on the best of her ideals as she was able, raised
\nsome decent kids, and believed in God, John Wesley, Brooks Robinson, and the Democrats. She played by the rules. <\/span><\/p>\n