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Sermon – “The Love That Shapes Our Lives”
An introduction and two messages Rev. Pescan, Brian Nielsen, Dana DEane
It is tradition at the Unitarian Church of Evanston to end our formal church year on the second Sunday of June. The annual meeting of Unitarians and Universalists is held the third week of June. Ending on the second Sunday allowed us to acknowledge Mothers’ Day, but we never got to acknowledge fathers.
So, because we never get to honor fathers on their traditional day of honoring, the third Sunday of June, several years ago I began to include fathers as part of this service, and then broadened it to include all those whose love came to us early, but continues to shape us all our lives. Twice, we had services Sunday evening in honor of women who have had miscarriages and abortions, and those who did not get to raise their children because they were incarcerated, or were divorced, or who released them for adoption. We celebrated the courage of the birth mothers of children adopted by members of our church.
We have also remembered parents who did not parent us well while remembering other adults who did. Not everyone’s mother is a paragon of love and caring. Nor is everyone’s father. Love is no simple thing. The love of an adult for a child is complex --- being guardian and advocate, disciplinarian and mentor, teacher and playmate, judge and comforter are only a few of the ways adults may be present in the life of a child, not all of them responsible or even safe.
This year on this Mothers’ Day, while acknowledging all of these, and grateful for the work of mothers and fathers, we celebrate grandparents. When I asked for volunteers to speak, Brian and Dana responded quickly. So, I thank them. After they speak, you will have a chance, in the silence, to name those whose love is still shaping your life --- mothers, fathers, grandparents, adults who loved you and helped you grow strong roots and wide branches.
“Who am I? Where am I from?” Brian Nielsen
When Barbara made a call on the UCE mailing list for congregants to consider sharing stories about their grandparents on Mother's Day, a couple of things occurred to me right away. First, I knew that my grandparents on my father's side have played a huge role in my life. Second, I felt hesitation about sharing stories about my grandparents. My grandparents were unusual, to put it simply, and so I wondered whether talking about them would resonate with others. I shared that concern with Barbara, and with her response that their stories might have intrinsic interest, I agreed to come up here and do it. That decision in turn led to deeper reflection on my part as to the meaning of these stories, and I'll share those thoughts too after the stories.
My grandparents on my mother's side were gone before I was born, as well as I knew. It was Mom and Pop, my father's parents, that I want to talk about -- two people who lived in Oklahoma, my home state, who were special to me, special to my parents, and all in all just plain special.
Both my parents and I and my brothers always called them Mom and Pop, as did my aunt and uncle and all my cousins. Other close family friends did too. Never "grandma and grandpa," never "grandmother or grandfather." But those names Mom and Pop didn't convey to me, like they might to you if you didn't know them, an old married couple from the Southwest, reminiscent of the Dust Bowl photographs of Dorothea Lange or Walker Evans. They weren't originally from Oklahoma. They were from Europe, and the contrast between their lives and the lives of most of the other families around Norman, Oklahoma had enormous influence on my father's life, and also mine.
Mom, before the rise of Hitler, was German, but after the mid-1930's claimed herself Hungarian, as she rightfully could, having been born in Transylvania, at the time within the Austro-Hungarian Empire ruled by the Hapsburg dynasty. Disowned by her German father because she insisted on going to the University in Budapest, she got a medical degree, then went from there to Copenhagen, where she did additional study in obstetrics and met my grandfather Pop.
Pop had come to Copenhagen from a farm in Denmark to study, and he studied physics. He was a student of Niels Bohr, and actually lived in the Bohr household while in school, as his own family had no means to support him. The relationship with Bohr, and with Niels Bohr's son Aage Bohr, remained close throughout their lifetimes. With the desperate economic conditions in Europe after the end of World War 1, as well as the imminent constriction of US immigration policy, Pop married Mom and immediately went to California, where he finished up his Ph.D. at Cal Tech. Mom finished her obstetrics study in Copenhagen, then followed him to the US. In 1921 or 22, Pop was hired by the University of Oklahoma to lead the physics department. There, in a state that was only 15 years old, Mom and Pop began a family with two sons and a daughter, living there in Norman until their deaths in the mid-70's.
In the early '30's Mom left the three children with Pop to spend a year at Harvard to get a public health degree and thus receive certification for practice as a physician in the US. She returned to Norman in the worst years of the Dust Bowl, and built up not only a practice in town, but went out into the country to attend to childbirths in farm houses, tents, and on reservations. With the economic times as they were, payment for her doctoring was made sometimes by barter, and at least part of what became Mom's extensive native American painting collection was acquired in exchange for bringing Indian babies into the world.
She also became an active and early advocate of natural childbirth, with news articles about her radical position in Time Magazine, Ladies Home Journal, and the New York Times in 1936. At the end of World War 2 she served as county public health director and an activist supporting the Farmer-Labor party movement in Oklahoma, until the chill of McCarthyism threatened her reputation in town, after which she avoided any active political work. She maintained her obstetrical practice, with her doctor's office occupying a significant amount of the first floor space in the large house that I and my brother spent every summer in. The front living room was the waiting room throughout the day, full of patients, until her gradual retirement in the late '60's.
The living room was also often a lively place in the evenings during the war, where Mom and Pop entertained many in the small intellectual community, such as Norman was. Pop's connection to Niels Bohr made the house what must have been a peculiar attraction in the early '40's, as fellow physicists came calling. Norman was a stop on the main train line between Chicago and Los Alamos New Mexico, and commuters such as Enrico Fermi and Robert Oppenheimer would stop in for a day or two to talk shop, staying over as the size of Mom and Pop's house could accommodate them, with my uncle in the Army fighting in Europe and my dad in the Navy, in the then-secret radar school. All before my time.
Mom and Pop were bigger than life in our nuclear family's house, even though we left Norman when I was less than two. Every summer, when my dad had to work on his dissertation, then his teaching, my mother, brother, and I would spend three months in their house, where Mom would take us swimming, to pow-wows and rodeos through the 1950's. Dad didn't seem to want to be with his parents, but my mother had as close an attachment to Mom and Pop as one could ever imagine. In the early '60's my parents separated, then divorced, and it was my mother who went away, leaving dad in the house -- and she went to Mom and Pop, her parents-in-law, to try putting her life back together, which she in fact never did.
In the turmoil, I also went to live with Mom and Pop then, and developed an especially close relationship with both of them. I was a pretty lonely child and teenager, and Mom and Pop did special things for me. In the summer of 1960, just the three of us went on a two-week auto trek, west to the Mesa Verde cliff dwellings, then south to Taos and the Acoma pueblos, then north to the Grand Tetons and Yellowstone and back to Norman. For them, I knew it was a long time to be away from their work, and they were taking me away to gain some peace, some calm and human contact when everything with my parents was confusion and fighting.
Pop counseled me in looking for a private boarding school for me to attend, though I ended up staying in Norman, going through high school at the University's lab school. Mom took me to plays and music events, and when my mother went into the state mental hospital -- the same mental hospital that Woody Guthrie's mother spent years in -- Mom and Pop let me visit her frequently, giving me support but also leaving me to explore my own interests -- in music, reading, and soaking in an Oklahoma rural culture that was in process of urbanizing. In those years my mother tried unsuccessfully holding various jobs, my older brother was thumbing his way back and forth across the country, and my baby brother was living with an aunt in South America. I lived with my mother mostly, but always had a bed at Mom and Pop’s, a refuge when things got too difficult and I needed someone to talk to.
I went back east for college, and I remember in the summer just before starting my freshman year Pop came to visit me in New York where I had a summer job. We went to the Museum of Natural History, and Pop tried, as he'd been doing for at least a couple of years, to talk me into pursuing math and science. I had different plans, and studied mostly in the social sciences in college, but Pop was always calm and gentle about it, never very strident in his arguments. In the years I was away at college Mom and Pop stayed in touch with my mother, trying to help her get on an even keel, and despite my mother's increasing alienation from them, they never turned her away.
Those are just some of the things I wanted to share about Mom and Pop, my grandparents who got thrown into the role of parents to me when they were well into their 60s. They weren't the couple you'd picture if you were to imagine two elderly people at mid-century in a state practically synonymous with redneck cowboys, oil rigs, and the displaced -- both native Americans and the Okies pushed out by the depression -- but there they were. They shaped my identity in ways I didn’t really recognize at the time, and I’ll be forever grateful to them.
“Deane’s Grandma” Dana Deane
Deane’s Grandma talks to Deane on the phone everyday. It’s magic.
Deane’s Grandma, he calls her Lyn, also happens to be my mother. To provide some context for my talk about Deane’s Grandma, I want to tell you a little about my mother, about some of the qualities my mother did not have when I was a kid. But, because it is Mothers’ Day and out of guilt, I will first tell you a couple of her great qualities as my mother.
First, I know that she is always on my side, absolute unconditional love. As an adult I recognize how rare that is, and how lucky I was (and still am) to have it.
My mom never forgot that she was the adult and I was the child, so she forgave all my childish transgressions, even when I committed them at age 25. But she never talked down to me or patronized; she addressed me as an equal (or at least a potential equal).
And she purposefully instilled in me the confidence to live as a strong, independent woman.
So, I think all of those positive qualities and more are a part of me.
However, to understand her as Deane’s Grandma, I need to tell you some of the qualities she did not have as a mother. (In fairness, neither do I.)
My mom was never a talk-baby-talk-to-your-baby kind of mother. She was not a get-on-the-floor-and-play-with-the-kids kind of mother. She was not a take-the-kids-to-Disneyland-because-even-though-you-will-hate-it-they-will-love-it kind of mother.
And, although she is and was an avid reader herself, she was not a read-to-your-kids kind of mother. In fact, she thought kids’ books were poorly written and generally pretty bad. And she certainly did not need to read them more than once. (Maybe the upshot of that was further independence. “If you like this story, you might want to learn how to read it yourself.”)
Finally, and most important to my point, my mother does not suffer fools. She is impatient with both systems and people that are slow or inefficient or otherwise waste her time. (I got a lot of that quality, too.)
Then, along comes Deane. Deane is our oldest child. And he was my parents’ first grandchild. Before the second was to come along, Deane was diagnosed with a chromosomal deletion labeled Smith-Magenis Syndrome. He’s missing a piece of a chromosome. There are lots of characteristics associated with this deletion, including an unusual sleep cycle, impulse control issues, and intellectual disability, which in Deane’s case is pretty serious.
Those of you who know Deane know that his most obvious deficiency is probably his speech—he doesn’t talk well. But I need to tell you that he talks much better than he used to. For many years, Deane’s primary communication medium was using sign language. Kevin, Ellis (and to a lesser extent, I) can sign with many a proficient two-year-old. But don’t ask us to sign with any of you who sign. You see, when you are learning to sign with and for a two-year-old, you learn farm and zoo animals, colors, and basic needs (eat, bathroom, stuff like that)—basically, baby talk—not much that’s useful to most conversations with people older than toddler-age.
Ironically, one of Deane’s greatest strengths has always been communication. He loves to communicate. He has what they call “high communicative intent”—he will work very hard to communicate. When he was younger, he would pull on people and point to what he wanted; he would use some speech, some sign, and some pantomime to get people to understand what he wanted to say. And because our sign language vocabulary was pretty limited and because he hears, Deane would use sign language homonyms. (For those of you thinking it is too early in the morning to remember which ones are homonyms, those are the words that sound alike but mean different things.) So, for example, Deane would use the sign for car to ask “Who’s going to car the turkey?”
Over the years, as Deane’s speech has improved, the signing and pantomiming have diminished and his speech has increased. But once in a while you may notice that he will not know how to say something or will not be understood; then he will fall back on sign language.
Deane has always liked to talk on the telephone. It didn’t work very well at first because he couldn’t use signing and pantomimes to communicate on the phone. (It was fun watching him try, though.) So, eventually, Deane would be on one phone and either Kevin or I would be on another trying to translate where we could. Although inconvenient for us, Deane didn’t mind—he wanted to stay connected. You might say that talking on the telephone was (and is) Deane’s favorite hobby. And beginning very early on, Deane’s favorite phone buddy was my mother. That’s right—my generally impatient, intolerant mother. She has talked to Deane on the phone nearly every day, for 10 to 20 minutes a day, for more than 10 years. No matter what she is doing, no matter what else is going on for her, when Deane calls, my mother usually stops what she is doing, and talks to Deane.
Now these are not always the most stimulating or engaging discussions, at least not from what I hear of them. Some of you may have talked to Deane frequently enough to know that he will often ask a series of concrete questions on the same topic each time he talks to you. (Sue: How many times has Deane asked what airline and what flight number we are taking to Boston on Thursday?) So, he asks the same questions every time he talks to you. And the same is true with his conversations with my mother—same questions every call. And, in the case of Deane’s Grandma, the result is almost comical. You see, Deane’s Grandma pretty much does the same things, eats the same things, and goes to the same places every day. So, day after day, the conversation is basically the same conversation. At least, that’s what it sounds like to me.
But, here’s the magic part. When I ask my mother if she minds talking to Deane every day, which I do occasionally (“After all, Mom, don’t you get bored?”), she exclaims, “Oh no, not at all!” My mom, who wouldn’t read Cat in the Hat to me even a second time (and probably never did read it to my younger brother), loves talking to Deane every day. My mom sees her conversations with Deane not in bite-sized daily occurrences, but in a continuum. She gains insights into how his mind works; she recognizes incremental improvements in his speech; she identifies increased complexity in his use of language; she notices improvement in his ability to engage as a talker as well as an interrogator; and she gets a kick out of the colloquial expressions that enter his lexicon (“Hey, guess what?” and “So, What’s the scoop for today?” being a few of the recent additions).
Deane’s Grandma loves him in a way I will never understand but very much admire. She may know him in a way that no one else does. And I think he knows her in a way I don’t, and in a way I don’t understand. In fact, when I step back and look at it, I cannot understand their relationship on any rational level.
So over the years, with input from my Uncle Fritz (my mother’s brother), I have put together a back-story for this. My mother would probably deny the connection; she talks to Deane because she loves him. She enjoys it. I believe that is true. But I think there is something else going on here. Here is what I believe. I believe this is all connected to my uncles.
You see, my parents are each the oldest child of their parents. They each have a living younger brother. But, between them and their living sibling, they each had another sibling, and both of those siblings died at or shortly after birth. In my dad’s case, evidently immediately. In my mom’s case, her brother Stephen lived for a while. Stephen was identified at birth, in 1941, as Mongoloid—meaning he probably had Down Syndrome. I understand that the doctors convinced my grandmother that “it would be better” if she never saw him and that he should be placed in a residential facility immediately—so he was. Stephen died shortly after that. My mother says that she believes that the guilt for sending Stephen away never left her family.
My Uncle Fritz says that Deane is our family’s opportunity for redemption. We’re doing it better this time. As a society, and as a family.
My mom, Deane’s Grandma, talks to Deane on the phone every day. Lovingly. Patiently. Every day.
Unitarian Church of Evanston
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