This was what Tom said at my mom's memorial service.
She was my mother-in-law for nearly 47 years. I don’t think she was that happy about it at
first. She had just uprooted her family
from her home country, and her beautiful daughter was marrying a big dumb American
who didn’t speak Vietnamese.
For almost all of those 47 years, we lived fairly close to
each other and saw each other quite often. She always impressed me as a very strong, very classy individual. She was certainly dealt a pretty tough hand
to play. Forced to flee her home
country in her late 40s, she escaped with her family to a strange cold country
where nobody spoke her language, and with very little money. But with unending energy and determination, she
played that hand beautifully, learning the language, getting a job, and buying
a house before moving to Virginia in 1989 to be closer to us.
Until 2022, we lived close to each other in Virginia, and we
got together many times. I got the feeling that she grew to like me or at least
to be happy that I was on the scene. She
was always kind to my parents, and I think they grew to respect each other and
enjoy each other’s company. I’m sure
that our marriage was not what either set of parents had imagined, but I know
that my parents grew to be very proud of their daughter-in-law and her
parents. When my mother could no longer
travel, my mother-in-law always told me that she missed my parents. It seems to me that both my own parents and
my in-laws grew from tolerance or acceptance, to something close to pride and love for their in-laws and their in-laws’
parents.
My mother-in-law reached her 90th birthday before
she slowed down and even then, she was in no mood to sit around. She was
always very energetic and ready for an outing, and this is one of the biggest
of many things about her that I will miss. Even when dementia robbed her of so much, so much of her spirit was
still evident and her abundant energy showed through until the last few
days. She was a dynamic woman and one of
the joys in my life was to know her.
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