It’s been just a few years since my Mom passed. She squeezed my hand and looked into my eyes as I told her that it was going to be okay, and she took her last breath.

With the exception of two years in the last 25 or 30, we always celebrated the holidays with her. The moments and memories still fill my heart.

The Star of David was cut out of two pieces of cardboard from a cereal box and wrapped in aluminum foil. This topped the Christmas tree each year all through our childhood. As we were sifting through my Mom’s belongings the day before the house was to be sold last year, my wife came across the box where she’d kept the star safely stored away for 11 months each year. A day or so after our tree was decorated this year, I noticed that she’d hung it from the tree at eye level. The initial few seconds of joy thinking about the memories were quickly overshadowed by the fact that she was no longer here. It hurt, deeply.

I wrote these words to speak at my Mom’s funeral service. They’ve been tucked away in my email ever since, sort of like the star in that box. Knowing how I felt seeing it proudly displayed in a slightly different context, I thought I’d do the same with my memories of her.

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Our Mom would wait until the hottest summer day, turn on the oven to what may as well have been 500 degrees, and proceed to bake chicken breasts for supper.

We ate ketchup on bread, lathered butter on Matzos, and built the tallest stack of peanut butter on crackers that we could fit in our mouths.

She would use powdered milk to turn one gallon into three…or four, to always make sure that we got our calcium. She would serve us liver that we could never get enough ketchup on to actually eat, to make sure that we got our iron. She wouldn’t let us leave the table until we either ate our vegetables or fed them to the dog while she wasn’t looking. She sewed on patches to our pants so that we wouldn’t have holes in the knees, but they always had some sort of creative style to them.

When I needed a haircut, when I actually used to need haircuts, I always felt like my Mom had my older sisters hold a secret session to see who would actually hold the scissors, while the others hovered around and gave advice on what would be the next appropriate cut.

We woke up one Christmas morning…in our Jewish household….to presents wrapped in the comics section of the newspaper because wrapping paper was too expensive to buy.

We never had the newest anything. Hand-me-downs were handed down, and then down again. Financially, things were tough, but we never knew it when we were so young. We never knew it, because our Mother made sure that we had everything that we needed. She raised 6 kids- by herself.

Always too proud to take a handout, there were times when she simply couldn’t help but have to. Still, she would never forget and repaid whatever was lent to her, even if it was never considered a loan.

I remember every kid on our street being at our house all the time, almost every one of them calling her “Mom”, and she treated them all like they were her own.

There were donuts, loaves of bread, cookies, and cakes surrounding us when we were growing up. I’ll admit that I got stung by a wooden spoon or two. I’ve always said that my Mom used to break so many wooden spoons on us that she’d buy them by the bagful, she was quick to clarify that she bought them in bulk because she had a bakery, but I still beg to differ.

My phone rang one day. She was asking me how to start my chainsaw that I’d left on her porch after doing some work because she had “just a few small trees” that she wanted to cut and didn’t want to bother me. I told her that I’d be right over, and to please not touch anything…at all.

I stopped by to see her one time in the summer, only to find the door wide open and blood on the floor from the kitchen to the bathroom. There was no note, no anything, her car was in the driveway and she was nowhere to be found. It wasn’t any of those things that made me know that something was terribly wrong, but the fact that the peroxide bottle on the bathroom vanity was sitting there with the cover off. If there’s one thing that she taught us, it was to NEVER leave the cap off of the peroxide. After a few calls down a list of friends, I tracked her down to the emergency room where she was safer than I’d feared, and I proceeded to clean up the carnage, first replacing the cap on the bottle. Just a bad cut that happened when the local clinic had already closed for the day.

In the wintertime, she would climb out of a second-story window and proceed to shovel off the porch roof. Except for one time, when she somehow enlisted my best friend to take on the task himself. Unfortunately, he managed to do something that she never did- fall off the roof in the process. I need to be honest, I’m so glad that he wasn’t hurt, but I would still love to see the video of that episode. After that, she didn’t dare seek outside help again for roof shoveling.

We celebrated everything. We didn’t miss any holidays, She baked cakes for every birthday, Thanksgiving was always a feast, and Hanukkah was eight nights of what we thought was magical while we each took our turn lighting a candle and watching anxiously as our Mom blessed the menorah. To this day, it’s the only Hebrew that I know, but because of her, I know it well.

My Mom was the best person I knew.

We were so loved, and we loved her so.

Thank you, Momma, thank you so much.