In Mom-orium

Apparently Sunday was the 100th Mother's Day - at least in the official holiday sense. It was No. 43 for me, but my first without my mother to call and thank for literally everything.

My mother, Eileen Michaux, died in November - just more than eight years after injuries suffered in a traffic accident on the way home from making her own mother's funeral arrangements left her wheelchair bound and limited her communication. Later this month she would have turned 77.

While her absence on Mother's Day was certainly disorienting, I can't say that this Mother's Day was empty. I woke up with the mother of my two children (who, as usual, were also in the same bed). We opened cards and gifts and had ice cream cake with my mother-in-law. I talked at length on the phone with my father and spoke to my brother-in-law, whose first child is due in August. Mother's Day was happy and fulfilling with family all around.

And for that I can thank my Mom again.

So as one last goodbye to my mother, I've attached the text of my tribute spoken at her memorial service last year.

Thanks again, Mom. I love you.

   I’m Scott Michaux, Eileen and Bill’s youngest son. While my brothers are 10 and 8 years older than me, I probably spent the most time with Mom. I wanted to just share a few stories about our mother.

   Mom was strong-willed and opinionated and never hesitated to let you know what she thought. Yet she supported every solid or stupid choice in life that any of us have ever made, whether it was to quit steady work and travel around the country or use all those years of expensive education to become a sports writer.
   She enjoyed a good laugh but hated if it came at her expense. But some of those moments are the favorites of our lives.
   Like the time the whole family went to the jailhouse in Woodbine, Georgia, after Mom went through a red-light trap. She’s still mad about it. Or the time when Dad and I dragged her out of bed in the middle of the night to drive from St. Pete to Charlotte to see if we could scalp tickets to see Richmond play in the second round of the NCAA Tournament. She demanded that we drop her off at the Tampa or Jacksonville airports, and each time we approached one Dad whispered to me “keep driving.”
   On another road trip to Florida when I was a teenager, we had made it as far as North Carolina when Mom suddenly realized she had forgotten to pack her only bathing suit and demanded my father turn the car around and go home to retrieve it. Dad simply said, “Eileen, after 25 years I think you deserve to buy a new one.” She didn’t like that idea but we kept going.
   She was one of the smartest women I’ve ever known. She was a voracious reader, consuming books in a few hours that would take the rest of us days to finish. A common refrain in our house. “Mom may not always be right, but she’s seldom wrong.”
That was seldom overruled.
   She was smart enough to do anything, and in another generation she might have. But she chose to become what is so insufficiently described as a “homemaker.” My brothers and I, we were her life’s work. Her nine grandchildren are the extension of that. She devoted herself to our family.
   My brothers were lucky in that their children got to know their Grandma. My children will have to see the true her reflected in me. But in other ways I was much luckier. I didn’t have to share my mother under the limitations of a young family trying to make ends meet. I had her mostly to myself. She was everywhere in my life.
   When I played soccer in high school, it was a winter sport. I’ll never forget one game with a blizzard coming down. When I looked into the bleachers, she was the only person there. She never missed anything we ever participated in.
   It should be noted that whatever athletic prowess any of us have came from her. Mom and I learned how to play golf together at Willow Oaks. I was 12 and she was 45. By the time we started keeping score, I was better than her. Yet every round we ever played she never failed to keep offering her sound advice – keep my head down and swing slower. Like any normal son, I have been ignoring that advice for 30 years and continue to suffer the consequences.
   About 15 years ago on a family trip to the beach in North Carolina, Tommy [the middle brother] and I played with Mom and Dad at a course called The Gauntlet. It didn’t take long to realize that my brother and I were in trouble. Mom was crushing us both. The further into the round we got, the more Tommy persisted in trying to invalidate what was happening. He protested that it wasn’t fair to compare since Mom was playing from the ladies’ tees. He reiterated that argument only two days ago.
   It was the only time Mom ever beat me over 18 holes and the only chance she ever had to beat us both. That was her major championship and I’m glad she won it - fair and square.
   The greatest lesson our mother and father taught us was through the example of their relationship. That brings me to my favorite family story that goes back to before we were a family.
   Fifty-six years ago our parents met at a Richmond/Randolph-Macon football game on a blind date that lasted only as long as halftime. It could have easily ended there and my brothers and I wouldn’t be here today.
   But each of them decided to give the other another chance. The salesman in my father refused to yield to the first two denials of going out on Friday or Saturday. But he talked her into a second date on Sunday for dinner in Williamsburg. After it was over, my mother couldn’t remember my father’s name and was too embarrassed to ask him again. But she did know him well enough to tell a friend, “I’m going to marry that man.”
   Since we’ve established she was seldom wrong, my father proposed to her that December. Not much more than a month after that, Mom contracted TB from the patients she took care of as a nursing student at MCV. As it will come as no surprise to anyone who has been around my parents for the last eight years, this frightening news did not deter my father. He gave Eileen a ring the day before Valentine’s Day in part to help cheer her up before she left to spend the next 10 months in Charlottesville hospitals fighting a disease that killed as many people as it didn’t in those days. He stuck by her with regular visits.
   Mom eventually weighed the pros and cons of undergoing surgery to remove a wedge of her lung. On the pro side, if successful it held the promise of living a normal life and having children. On the con side was that 60 percent of patients typically didn’t survive the surgery.
   Mom didn’t hesitate to take her chances. After 16 hours of major surgery, she walked to the phone booth herself to speak to her mother. When doctors warned her that her lung was not re-inflating and would have to be removed in the morning if it didn’t, she exerted herself by walking the ward all night filling everyone’s drink glasses and re-inflated the lung.
   Those committed, dedicated and courageous decisions by both of our parents are the reason we’re here today – some of us quite literally.
   That story of love and devotion lasted 56 years. It deserved, and my mother deserved, a better ending. But the woman who was seldom wrong had plenty of proof that she made the right decision about the man she married.
   We thank her. We love her. And we’ll dearly miss her.