The eulogy for my mother

Eulogy for Elizabeth Ann Mueller Curnutte, Aug. 16, 1929-Oct. 26, 2006. Written and delivered Oct. 31, 2006, St. Patrick’s Catholic Church, Dixon, Ill., by her fifth of seven children, Mark Joseph Curnutte.

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The story of the life of Elizabeth Ann (Mueller) Curnutte can not be told without including her partnership with her late husband, John.

Dad’s personality could fill a room. He never met a stranger. Mom often was most comfortable in the background.

They reminded me of the refrain from an old Harry Chapin song: “He was the sun, burning bright and brittle. She was the moon, shining back his light a little.”

This arrangement, while true in public, was not always the case in our home. It was her turf. In the whole of their union, John and Betty had equal but complementary strengths.

And she, though completely intertwined with her husband, was her own person. And that Betty Ann is the woman we remember here today.

She was born Aug. 16, 1929, in Peru, Ill., the seventh of eight children and third of four daughters born to Henry Joseph and Margaret Ann Mueller.

“She was always very strong-minded, very determined to carry it through,” one of her sisters, Midge, says. “She was always a very positive person. I never remember her complaining.”

Betty Ann took years of piano lessons. Music came naturally to her, it seemed, but it was the result of a fierce work ethic. She played the organ at Mass for many years.

One day, her father was late coming home to give her a ride to church. She decided to take a short cut, walking through the woods between the house and church. She would have to jump a fence but didn’t realize the owner had driven nails into the top rail. Betty Ann cut her leg but went on and played, despite the blood.

She was graduated from the St. Joseph Commercial High School after two years of intense bookkeeping and secretarial arts study.

Betty Ann married relatively young, even for the era, at age 21 in December 1950. She and John had seven children and settled in Dixon – first on Chicago Avenue, then West Second Street, finally at 810 S. Galena Ave. They would have 16 grandchildren.

But that information is data, the cold, hard fact of biography that only begins to describe Betty Ann.

During the past few days, I asked each of my three sisters and three brothers to recall Mom – or, better yet, Betty Ann – as an individual, apart from her life as Mrs. John Curnutte, as difficult as it is to separate the two.

Spencer, 34, of Cincinnati, her youngest child, referenced the word “discipline” but not in a “calloused hand upside the head kind of way,” he says, “but discipline in the sense that nothing in life comes for free.”

He remembers specifically his fourth-, fifth- and sixth-grade years, and the mandatory, Mom-enforced after-school trumpet lessons. She didn’t just tell him to practice. She sat with him.

“Half an hour, no exception,” he says. “She knew her stuff. I had to work.”

Lucy, 40, the baby girl, now also of Cincinnati, was the Christmas Eve miracle in 1965. She ran through a series of adjectives to describe Mom.

"Extremely strong … poised … wise ... unselfish … practical,” Lucy says. “She was part of a team that gave us the strongest sense of a warm, simple life.”

Barbara, 48, the fourth of the seventh who now lives in New Hampshire, also was succinct.

“I will miss Mom in ways I can’t even comprehend yet,” she says.

Barbara leaned on Mom when she had an unplanned pregnancy later in life. It was also important to her that Mom know her children.

“And she did,” Barbara says. “And the door was always open for us to visit.”

Joan, 50, the one who stayed in Dixon, took on most of the responsibility when first Dad and then Mom fell ill and died. (Joan, thank you from all of us.) But she also got to know them best.

“We did a lot the last few years since Dad died, mostly talking,” she says. “So I am going to miss her. Mom was my friend. She was my mom, too.”

“Even still?” I ask.

“Of course.”

Paul, 53, came back to Illinois from Massachusetts with his family in 1990.

“As hard as it is to think of her as a non-partner, she did operate almost independently of (Dad),” he says. “It wasn’t until I was in high school that Dad became an obvious force in the house. Sometimes, I think he was more of a disruptive influence. She created the peaceful environment.”

Paul remembers Mom as a “strong, independent woman, not as an appendage, not a lesser partner,” but as a person, and I quote him again, “who came up with a practical, common-sense approach to what life afforded at the time. Her greatest achievement is each one of us.”

John, 55, is the oldest of the seven and has settled in northern California.

“Their lives, and her life, were no less gritty than most people’s lives,” John says. “They had all the tears, worry, arguments, feeling of `how are we going to make it?’ But they got through it.”

Paul and John’s moral: To idealize and romanticize Mom and Dad’s lives is to reduce them.

Mom revealed her strength in the wake of her husband’s illness and death in February 2003. She put into practice some of her greatest advice: Respond to life’s pain, its disappointments, by going on the attack. Get busy. Achieve.

Mom organized and sold the four-bedroom family house on Galena Avenue. At age 74, she went to driving school and earned her first license. And with John and Joan’s loving assistance, she turned a house on Tee Street into the new family home.

I have attempted here to give voice to my brothers and sisters’ words. But these last words are mine. I am Mark, 44, of Cincinnati. And Mom, like Dad, also made me feel like I was the favorite.

I recall Mom’s consistency. She was always there for me. And the rare times she wasn’t, she was with Lucy. The meals always were hot. Food was plentiful, like she could multiply fishes and loaves. The house always was clean, the clothes always washed and folded.

I also recall her sitting at her sewing machine. I’ll never forget riding around town in Dad’s company car as a kid and him pointing out all the shop windows adorned with drapes that Mom had sewn at home to help make ends meet.

I remember how pretty she looked and smelled every day, the pride she had in her appearance, especially during those few years she worked part-time in the catalogue department at a downtown department store.

I remember when Dad – later in life -- told me the family was in trouble financially until Mom took control of the money. Every cent was accounted for in the ledger she kept in the buffet in the dining room.

Ultimately, I see Mom and Dad together.

We’re taught and believe God’s promise of eternal life. Its splendor is beyond our ability as humans to imagine.

But paradise for Mom and Dad, I think, might be simply being together now and forever.

In my vision, I see a table. I see Dad at one end, nearest the floor register, the
radio within arm’s reach and tuned to a White Sox or Reds game, or maybe the Bulls are on. The newspaper, most likely that day’s Chicago Tribune, is folded on a chair.

I see Mom at the other end of the table. She has put down some knitting or just come back from putting the financial ledger away in the dining room.

There are two copper mugs and a quart of beer.

From my bedroom above the kitchen, I hear that familiar rhythm of dice rattling in a cardboard cup, that sound that lulled me securely to sleep as a child as would the calming pendulum of a grandfather clock.

The first game of Yahtzee is on.

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Epilogue: Elizabeth Curnutte's memorial and a portion of her estate will be donated to St. Patrick's Church, Dixon, Ill., to complete the purchase of a new organ.