Monday, May 13, 2024
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The following are the witness I gave at my sister's funeral on May 11 2024:
How to describe my sister? She began her life as Laurie Christine Heck: the middle of 3 sisters, whose mother was the oldest of 3 sisters, whose mother was the oldest of 7 sisters. Laurie looked most like our dad in appearance and from him she got her love of the arts and music. Our parents didn’t have a lot of material things and faced many challenges in their own youths. Even though we didn’t have a lot of material things, the purchase of a baby grand piano and piano lessons was considered an important part of our education. Sadly none of us ever kept up with it. We all made trips to the Metropolitan Opera, even if the tickets were in the last row of the balcony or standing room. There was a lot of estrogen in the family lineage and we 3 sisters learned from our mother, a strong woman whose strength came from her coming of age in the Great Depression. These are some of the lessons learned from our mom that helped make Laurie the woman wife and mother that she became:
• Never waste anything. Laurie was very good at saving things be it leftover food or furniture found at the side of the road that she thought could be repurposed. Or newspaper articles she thought I would enjoy reading as she continued to consume the written word in its printed format. She knew how to sew and made many her daughter’s dresses. Applesauce? Never from a jar. Buy bushels of apples in the fall, cook them yourself, grind them in the Foley Food Mill that she got from mom, and freeze it for the coming year. There is no comparison.
• Another lesson: Take care of each other. We first saw this when our grandmother came to live with us as she aged. The lesson continued to our generation with the best example being our sister Carolyn’s decline into dementia. In a period over more than 10 years, Laurie especially took care to always find ways to get her out and about. This involved lunches, trips to local sights, book club and exercise at the Y, and of course any event at church, primarily bible study and Sunday worship.
• Another lesson: Have a forgiving heart. You could never say anything bad about anyone to Laurie. Which made for interesting conversations when you were mad about something and expected her to agree with your point of view.
• Out of all of us Laurie was the one with the strongest sense of family. She organized Heck family reunions for many years and kept track of the many aunts, uncles and cousins, writing newsletters that she sent to all. Our mothers smaller branch of the family was kept even closer to her heart with many trips to visit them as they roamed the world.
• Thus, she was able to combine her love of family with her other great love, travel. For a woman who never moved from the town she grew up in, she saw so much of the world both while visiting her daughter and her aunt and cousin as well as independent travel. If you moved away from Madison, you could be sure to expect a visit from Laurie. All she wanted was for us to always be together and if she had to travel halfway around the world to make that even better.
• That leads to the one of the most memorable things about my sister: FOMO, Fear of Missing Out, if that is ever a term accepted into the dictionary, they should use her picture next to it. Except one picture would never do, there would have to be pictures of her biking, hiking, singing, playing tennis, at a play on Broadway or the opera, swimming in the Ocean (and a few times getting pulled out by lifeguards) just to name a few. She lived life to the fullest and each day as if it were the last.
• And of course, it should never go without saying her great love of family: Jay, her daughters, Christie and Kim and her grandchildren Ryan, Elyse and Jason. These were the people who she loved more than anything.
• So, she shows us a path: Never waste anything, Take care of each other and Have a forgiving heart.
• The final lesson: Love God and be kind to each other. This was her last request of us. May we all strive to fulfill her wish.
