There are a large number of people that I admire. For this post, however, I’m going to focus on my mother, Donna Harris. For those who may not know, she passed away this past January mere hours after her 77th birthday ended.¹

My mother was a wonderful woman, a devoted wife, and a loving mother of three children. She worked most of my life as a healthcare worker. She became a nurse’s aid when I was in early elementary school. She provided home health care, then switched to working in a hospital, and eventually became a registered nurse a few years before she retired.² She was devoted to her patients and excellent at her job. I’ve often shared with people at my amusement over how she was a confirmed mathphobe. However, when it came time to do the calculations involved in properly administering certain medications, she was a champ. I often joked that despite the fact she hated and feared high school algebra, she could solve any algebra problem as long as it was phrased as a word problem about administering medications.

She loved all three of us kids dearly and showed a commitment to that love even when each of us sometimes made loving us difficult. I know that she struggled with me coming out as gay and it was at least a decade before she could talk about it without things getting emotional or tense. But by the time that my husband and I married, she embraced him as part of the family and did everything to make him welcome. I’m not sure how she dealt with the fact that I left Christianity and chose to devote myself to Freyja and the other Norse deities. To be honest, I’m not sure how much she knew about my religious inclinations, as it was something we didn’t really talk about.³ But again, I always knew that she loved me no matter what.

As I write this post, I’m sitting her and thinking I’d love to pour out a bit of mead for her if I had any. I’m not sure how she’d feel about it. But I hope that she knows that I love her and admire both what she did for me and how she helped shape the person I am today. She is most definitely among my revered ancestors.

The funeral home director who took care of having my mother cremated also wrote this lovely obituary for her based on information he received from my father.

(This post is part of #ChangingPathsChallenge2024. For for information on the challenge and a list of topics, please see this post by Yvonne Aburrow.)

Footnotes

1. In many ways, I feel like this post is a long overdue eulogy for her, as I am still completely aghast at the church service that masqueraded as her memorial service back in February. ↩︎
2. I’ve always felt it tragic that a work-related back injury basically forced her into early retirement. Becoming a nurse had been Mom’s dream since I was teenager and I wish she had been able to enjoy the fruits of that dream and her labors to make it come true for at least a few more years. ↩︎
3. Hey, I figured navigating my sexuality was hard enough. Why make things even more difficult? ↩︎