Hello, and welcome, everyone!
We are all gathered, virtually, to commemorate Miriam Bryan, Mim, who passed away on January 26th, 2022. We are here to remember her, to celebrate her life and her works and to renew the love we shared with her and share with each other.
Thank you, everyone, for joining us today. Thank you to our hosts, Joe and Rebecca, and thank you to our other behind-the-scenes organizers, facilitators, editors, archivists, and tech crew, also including Dena and John, and of course my sibs. And thank you to those who will speak this evening.
In our culture, families traditionally gather for weddings and funerals.
Why do we do that?
• It cultivates a sense of family and community, when we share special occasions, whether they’re happy or sad. We connect with those we love.
• It gives a sense of meaning and significance to our lives. We note the milestones, perform the rites. The occasion itself plays a significant role in the grand scheme of our lives.
• We refresh lasting fond memories, place a mental bookmark, by sharing pictures, memorabilia, anecdotes, and other memories.
• And we take our place in the circle of life. We were all born, we will all die. That’s part of the human condition. We connect our humanity with all those who have gone before us and who will follow us.
Mim was born in 1927. She was a child of the Great Depression, who grew up on a farm.
Somewhere I have Mim’s diary from when she was in high school, written in her surprisingly legible schoolgirl hand, about which dreamy boy or annoying pest was paying attention to her this week. But those juicy details will have to keep for another time.
But her mother, Belle, also kept a diary. I have here a small notebook from 1941. On Feb 1, Belle says, she milked as usual, and fed two cows, four pigs, three dogs, two cats, one rabbit, and five chickens. No account of feeding children or husband.
That week she had precious little help from her 13-year-old high school freshman daughter Miriam, who had just broken her collarbone in gym and was wearing a big splint.
Belle’s diary was not too complimentary of her in-laws, “the Pearces”. She took young Miriam to buy some new shoes. Belle’s mother-in-law, Gram Elvie, and Elvie’s sister Great Aunt Winnie were sternly disapproving that those shoes had heels! Here’s what Belle said.
“They do so resent Miriam’s becoming a ‘young lady’ and wearing any grown-up clothes. I have never been able to figure out why it is ok to dress like a teen age girl when you are sixty, but wrong to dress as a teen age girl when you are thirTEEN. Perhaps I’ll know the answer when I am 60.”
That was not to happen.
Twelve years later, both of Mim’s parents, Belle and Lew, and her brother Nicky, were killed in a tragic road accident.
At 25, some of us are scarcely out of college, finding our footing, dealing with “impostor syndrome”, learning how to be grown up enough to make our way in the world.
At 25, Mim was married, and had a rambunctious three-year-old and a one-year-old baby. And her disabled sister, Louise. And had to deal with multiple lawsuits seeking damages from the trucking company that killed her family, and countersuits from them blaming their victims.
She had help from her younger sister Wini, who at 20 was still holding down the farm.
But they had to be tough.
Even after the grieving and the settlements, that household still had some squabbling among the children. Eight-year-old Louise and 3-year-old Ricky didn’t always play nicely together. There’s one story that I remember but only because Dad liked to tell it. One day Louise and I were in the back yard. She bonked me on top of the head with both hands. I turned toward the house looking like I was ready to cry, then turned around and socked her right in the stomach. Louise mostly left me alone after that.
Now it’s well established that mothers have eyes in the back of their heads. But Mim needed a solution that would let her take at least one eye off Ricky for a few seconds at a time.
With baby Katherine in the home, there was a lot of laundry. Mim dried the laundry on a clothesline that stretched from the back porch to a tall fence post across the back yard.
I still have a vague memory, from that three-year-old era, of being buckled into some harness thing. On the back, it had a sort of lead or strap that would clip over the clothesline so it could slide from one end to the other. On non-laundry days, she could set me up to play in the back yard, without worrying about me wandering off.
She had me on a leash, clipped to a dog run! Really, Mom?
Years later, I tried to tease her about the dog run. But she wouldn’t be teased. “What was wrong with that?” she said. “It was perfectly practical.” I guess she was right.
Like Mim, her husband Joe grew up on a farm during the Great Depression.
That might explain their attitude of “Don’t throw that out! It might be useful someday!” (Some of that may have rubbed off on her children.)
Being careful and frugal and “waste not, want not” means you will gradually accumulate stuff.
Moving across the street in Oceanport, NJ, wasn’t enough to scrape off any stuff. After they retired, when they moved to Allendale, SC, they left a lot for the trash man, but somehow plenty of stuff moved to SC. When Joe died, his share of stuff remained. When Mim moved from SC to assisted living in Massachusetts, she left, wow, stuff. And we cleaned it up. We received a lesson, called “the boomer burden”, that WE shouldn’t leave stuff for OUR heirs to clean up for us. (I think Patty knew that already). My sibs can speak for themselves, but for me, I have yet to apply myself to that task. Sorry, kids.
Besides being tough, Mim was intrepid. Bob has stories about that.
I have a little notebook of hers from 1962. Joe was on extended business in Sardinia and the company sent Mim to join him in Rome for 10 days.
She set us kids up for the duration with a babysitter (how totally mature 13-year-old Ricky dealt with that is another story) and she literally took off.
Mim and Joe had a good time in Rome, visiting all over. About St. Peter’s she said “interesting but SO big and so much to see, it lost its appeal”. They even found a Presbyterian church (in Roman Catholic Rome!) with a Scottish minister.
But Joe still had daytime meetings, so she was on her own during most days. She had a street map and phrase book but non capisco l’italiano and visited neighborhoods anyway, explored narrow alleys leading to courtyards with fountains and statues, noticed “clothes hung out from windows any old place,” went in little shops and bargained with shopkeepers (her notes say questo è troppo caro, that is too expensive), toured up & down the Spanish Steps, navigated the “confusion of streets” with “piazzas named on all sides.”
One time she stopped to check her map and a 20-year-old “boy,” as she called him, asked if he could help. She indicated no and moved on. He followed. She got out her dictionary and said “I am not confused” but she couldn’t understand his reply. She left but he still followed 10 feet behind.
She was getting worried about how to lose him, when an American woman happened to see her with her map and asked how to find a particular street. Mim explained about the “boy”, and the two of them ducked into an exclusive knitwear shop. She wound up buying a tailored suit!
Some years back I went to a memorial event for the father of an old college buddy. I was impressed that many people admired his community service.
But somehow in all my years in Oceanport I had been nearly blind to the service that Mim performed, for her civic community and for her church. Sometimes it feels like bragging to list all the high-powered offices she held, president of this and board of that, but think of it as her level of service:
• town bond issue for new school building
• PTA president
• League of Women Voters president
• first woman on town council
• pushed through multiple parks and other civic betterment
• served as a church elder (like board of directors)
• zillions of newsletters and bulletins
• even a trained expert judge for flower shows
Our Mim was energetical.
Sometimes it’s hard for me to reminisce about feeling love, growing up. There’s no way to know how much of that is about me. I didn’t really pay any attention back when the whole world revolved around me.
My mother must have loved me deeply, to put up with me, and not send me off to a military boarding school!
Like all kids, there were a lot of things I hated to hear over and over again.
- take out the garbage
- wash the dishes
- don’t make me nag
- do your homework
- don’t dawdle so
- you could get A’s if you’d just apply yourself
and of course the Dad one,
- don’t talk to your mother that way!
Did I miss her tenderness? Her loving smiles? Her appreciation and admiration? But I know now, that demonstrating that kind of love, sharing it, is a mutual thing. And I’m afraid I wasn’t participating.
I was an ornery, obstreperous pre-teen and adolescent. (Some might say I still am.) I was troubled in my own way, and then I left for college. By the time I learned how to pay attention to love in the home, I mostly missed my chance, ’cause I didn’t live there any more.
She had her flaws, like all of us, because she was human. But she always gave her best, with her best love.
The researcher and philosopher Douglas Hofstadter argues that those who die still live on, in the people who knew, and loved, and cherished them.
In the Disney/Pixar movie “Coco”, the folklore has it that the spirits of the deceased live on in the underworld, but only so long as someone of the living remembers them.
Through her works and her love, Mim Bryan—mother, grandmother, matriarch, kinswoman, colleague, friend—lives on within us.
Let us honor her and her memory.
Thank you.
February 17, 2022