As you know from my last post, we had a death in the family this past week. My Aunt Bettie, wife of my mom's brother, succumbed to pancreatic cancer. Her death at the age of 83 was a surprise to her, her husband and our family. The diagnosis came one day and death five days later. The only saving grace in the story is that she didn't suffer long. Thank our merciful God.
The best part of the eleven sorrowful days I spent with Mom, Aunt Bettie and Uncle Jack and their son and daughter, Jamie and Teresa, was that we got to visit for long hours and console and commiserate with each other . . . and laugh and laugh about old times. My family is not lacking smart, quick-witted comedians!
My cousins are the most interesting folks you could ever meet -- Jamie lives in Bali, Indonesia and Teresa lives in the Los Angeles area. Jamie is a gifted writer with several books of varying themes including the scholarly Music of the Spheresand many intriguing magazine articles to his credit including works in National Geographic, Atlantic Montly, Conde Nast's Traveler, and other prestigious periodicals. At one point I remember, he was the opera critic for the London Times. Last year, he met a steamer ship and and joined the trip to write about it.
Teresa is just as accomplished as a singer and songwriter with a band that includes her musician husband who also writes songs. Teresa has many gigs all over the world including Denmark, the Netherlands, an annual cruise to the Caribbean - and she had to cancel their European Tour last month because of her mom's illness and death. Teresa has various T.V. and movie background song credits - many I don't recall. She sang the theme song for the TV show, Step by Step and was the writer of Sittin' By the Side of the Road, the song that Andie MacDowell sang in the movie Michaelwhile she served also as Andie MacDowell's voice coach for that movie. Can you see why the family always looks forward to the rare visits we get with these two phenomenal people? (Check out the left sidebar here on my blog for links to some of the things produced by these two talents!)
While I am recuperating from my tiring days and trying to catch up in my own life, I wanted to share with you the events of my aunt's memorial service. Jamie wrote and delivered a tender, heart-touching eulogy and we were delighted at his story about his mother. Afterwards, Teresa sang the most beautiful acappella rendition of Amazing Grace you've ever heard. She has a gorgeous voice. We all sang along with the final chorus. Not a dry eye in the house.
Bettie Wilson James, January 9, 1925 – April 17, 2007
Eulogy written and delivered by son, Jamie James
Memorial service, Cornerstone Funeral Home, Hillsboro, Texas
April 21, 2007
I’m here to talk about Bettie James, my mother. I’m a bit prejudiced on this subject – you won't be surprised to hear me say that she was the most lovable person I ever knew. I don’t need to tell you that she was lovable, because you all knew her – and if the saying “To know her was to love her” ever applied to anybody, it applied to Bettie. For her, love wasn’t something that she hoarded and doled out to the people closest to her. In Bettie’s case, to know her was to BE loved.
I’m not a serious student of the Bible, as Mother was. But for me the most important teaching of Jesus is “Love thy neighbor.” That was one lesson that Bettie didn’t have to study. It was the basis of her whole approach to life. For her, it didn’t just mean to love the people close to her, the nice people who loved her right back – that’s easy. Bettie was like Will Rogers – she never met anybody she didn't like. I’m not saying she was a saint: she got mad at people, mainly if they “acted tacky” or “talked ugly,” as she would put it. But I can’t remember her ever staying mad, not at anybody.
This is my eulogy of my mother, so I have a certain license here, but in Bettie’s case I don’t think I’m sugarcoating. The sweetness of her nature just kind of took over every aspect of her life. I remember once when Jack and Bettie came to visit me in New York City, where I was living at the time, we went out for a walk one fine morning. As we were wandering around in Greenwich Village, there was a wino lying in the gutter, passed out, looking as sick and wretched as he could be. I saw him and tried to steer Bettie across the street, but she saw him lying there, and said, “Horrors! Jamie, look at that poor man! He needs help. We need to call a policeman or somebody to help him.” I had to explain to her that this was New York, and that wino was probably better off lying in the gutter than if the police hauled him off to jail.
She always wanted to help people, it didn’t matter who they were. Of course she did love her actual neighbors – I’m so happy to see Shirley Brown Wright and her daughter Georgia, and Kyle Johnson and Barron Ludlum, and Mae Holm – the last of our gang from Caywood Lane. And Luz Elena and her family, and our other neighbors from Church Street, here in Hillsboro. Bettie made friends with them just as soon as she and Jack moved into town. But as I said, Bettie’s idea of neighborliness was as expansive and broad as Jesus intended it to be, in my understanding of the great commandment.
* * *
Bettie always had a vulnerable, girlish air, but that’s all it was. She was brave. When she was just 21 years old, immediately after she graduated from Ole Miss, she moved from Oxford, Mississippi, all by herself to Houston. Soon after that came the most important event in her life, when she met Jack James at an ice cream parlor; within a year they were married. From that time forward she considered herself a Texan, but she never lost that delightful, seductive Deep South accent, soft as a breeze in a magnolia tree. But if you ever wanted to get Bettie riled up, all you had to do was say something about that accent. She would say, “Now lookee heah, I do NOT have an accent. I’m a Texan.” Yet she never lost her bond with Mississippi, and went home to see her parents in Oxford at least twice a year. She remained very close all her life to her cousin Margaret Mitchell, who was like a sister. I am so happy to see her here today.
When Bettie moved to Houston, in 1946, the population was about 400,000: that was before Foley’s opened its first store, before the Alley Theatre gave its first performance. Professional sports were a dream of the future. When she and Jack moved to Caywood Lane, just outside the loop, it was in the middle of the woods. We used to have armadillos sitting out there staring at the back porch lights every night. But by 1997, when Jack and Bettie had their 50th wedding anniversary, the city had grown 10 times over. By then, Teresa had married and moved off to Los Angeles to pursue her musical career that Mother was so proud of, and married and had a family; and I was living in New York, spending more and more time in Asia. She and Jack had had enough of life in the big city, and they ended up settling here in Hillsboro. Mother was happy to get back to living in a small town like the one she had grown up in. And once again, she spread the love. She made friends with people here, so many good friends here today. Soon she thought of them, and they thought of her, as if they had been friends for life.
* * *
And more than anything in the world, she loved Jack James. She was crazy about him from the moment they met. I grew up thinking that’s the way all married couples were – it was a great shock to me later on when I found out about things like separation and divorce. There was never one day when she stopped loving Jack, not one day. Now she was flesh and blood, and Dad can be ornery, and she had certain strong feelings and fixed ideas that couldn’t be crossed. So of course there were times when she got mad at him – but it never lasted, never, and her underlying devotion to Jack never faltered, not ever. Even when she didn’t go along with his ideas, she supported him body and soul. In everything he did, she stood right there next to him.
And she loved his family. I remember her once telling me that her favorite book of the Bible was the book of Ruth. She always tried to emulate the example of Ruth, to be a dutiful daughter-in-law to my grandmother, Rama Miller James. She honored my grandfather, Grady James. Indeed she attached herself to all the Jameses and Millers just as if they were blood kin – especially the family of Jack’s beloved big sister, Dorothy. Bettie always thought of her as her own sister, and loved her children, my cousins Sally, Jack, and Jim, like her own.
* * *
Now we come to the subject I know best. Bettie loved her children, Teresa and me, with an unwavering intensity that sometimes amazed us. Heaven knows I gave her plenty of opportunities to be disappointed and angry with me, but it just wasn’t in her nature to be stern. She was such a loving mother that Teresa and I worried far more about making her unhappy than we ever did about getting into trouble. I always knew that if I needed her, she would be there for me, with physical warmth – she was always big on hugs and kisses and what she called love taps, which were sometimes close to noogies – and with words of encouragement and hope. Most mothers would have been disappointed if their only son moved literally halfway around the world to live in a tropical island, as I did, when I ran off to Bali, in 1999. Well, I’m sure Bettie was disappointed too, but she never complained about that: she never complained about anything.
Whatever I am today, I owe it Bettie. I am a writer, and I know my career began at Bettie’s knee – when I was just a little boy, when Teresa was still a baby, Bettie used to read to me, every single night, before she turned out the light. And it wasn’t just ten minutes, to hush me up and go to sleep; she was a serious, gifted reader. Good books, by Robert Louis Stevenson, Louisa May Alcott, Mark Twain. Tom Sawyer was our favorite; then we moved on to Huckleberry Finn: I didn't realize till I read that book in high school how much she had censored it, skipping over all the mean parts, as she would have put it. When I was old enough to read big books on my own, I asked her what was the best novel of all. She pondered that and said, Gone with the Wind.
The most obvious lesson I learned from all this was the power of storytelling, which pointed me in the direction of telling stories myself. I recently reread Treasure Island, and realized that that was where I first had the idea of living on a tropical island. From Huckleberry Finn I learned about tolerance, and accepting all people. As for Gone with the Wind, I don't what the lesson was there – I guess, if you’re going to write a book, make it a bestseller. That’s a lesson I haven’t mastered yet.
Bettie taught us always to tell the truth. When I was in eighth grade, we were supposed to make an insect collection, to catch 10 or more bugs and mount them with pins in a box with the data about where and when we collected them, like a real biologist. My collection began with a cockroach, and I wrote down the time and place: Saturday morning, 10 am, Kitchen, 1418 Caywood Lane. When I showed Bettie my collection, she made a wry face when she saw that, and said, “Are you sure you want to say that?” And I said, “But Mama, that’s where I caught it.” And she said, “Well, you're right, you better leave it just like that.”
In fact that rule against lying was one she used to bend all the time: she didn’t count fibs. But she never told a fib to make things work out to her advantage. If she told a fib, it was always to keep from hurting someone’s feelings. For Bettie, that was the most important rule of life: The worst thing you could ever do is to hurt somebody’s feelings. Well, that’s another way of saying the Golden Rule, isn’t it? Whenever she was in doubt about what to do, she tried to do what would make someone happy. I don’t have to tell you how well she lived up to that, because so many of you here today have been telling me, and Jack and Teresa: What a great lady she was, What a kind and gracious lady she was, They don’t make ’em like Bettie James any more. Well, after all it’s true: they don’t. Those lessons that she taught me and Teresa, which seemed to us when we were growing up to be the bedrock virtues of living and getting along in this world, nowadays seem to be in danger of becoming quaint, old-fashioned concepts. But I will never think of them that way. For me Bettie’s lessons will always represent an ideal of moral, honorable conduct.
It’s not just Jack, and Teresa and me, and all of you sitting here today, whose lives are diminished by the passing of Bettie James. The world is a poorer place, a less kind and loving place, than it was.
We miss you, Mama.
