Our “Colorful” Relationship

Eulogy 1/13/09 by Jeff Musman

Three days ago my sister and I stood by mother’s side as we watched her take her last slow breath…

I loved my mother unconditionally as she did me. I have no doubt that for her it has been so for a lifetime; for me, I’m not sure. I am certain only of the last twenty five years or so.

Before that I think it is fair to say that my mother and I did not always see eye to eye. Growing up I had a very “colorful” relationship with my mother.

Red—the color of the fire in her eyes when she came home after a 10 or 12 hour workday to discover that I had somehow disrupted her obsessively clean and ordered household;

Orange—the color of the splatters she found on the walls and floors of our kitchen following the orange-ade soda fight my friends and I just had;

Green-the color of the paint covering large portions of the basement floor from another such imbroglio;

Black and blue—the obvious result of the two prior incidents.

Black and white—for many years when my mother said “black”…I did “white.”

My mother was a beautiful, intelligent, direct, complex woman. Admittedly, for many years, the subtleties were lost on me.

My mom was born in the nineteen twenties, the first child of an immigrant father and a mother, the first American born child of Eastern European immigrants. My grandfather came to this country as a young boy, but until the day he died, sounded in his speech as if he had come to this country…yesterday. He loved art and music and spoiled my mother, his daughter, happily, endlessly. My mother loved her father, but it was my grandmother who provided the strength and was for most of their lives the primary bread winner of the family. You see, my mother comes from a line of strong women. My mother lived at a time when women were only beginning to leave the home. She was not encouraged to pursue an advanced degree. She was expected to marry young and raise children, and she did, marrying my father at age 20 upon his return from active duty in 1945. Eighteen months later, she had her first child—the contrary one… me.

My dad came back from the war to take over his parents’ gas station and fuel oil delivery business, his father dying before my birth. My mother joined him working in the business almost immediately after I was born.

My dad was a wonderful man. Everyone loved my father and he loved everyone. He lived, however, in something of a fantasy world, not an imagined world, not an easy world, just one without rough edges. It was left to my mother to smooth out the rough edges. It was my mother who sat in the office, who hired and fired, who answered the phone, who called the customers looking for payment, who dealt with problems as they arose. It was my mother who ran the business and it was my mother who was expected to raise and discipline the children, to make dinner at the end of the day and to organize the house.

It was not easy for my mother living in two spheres each of which she had to rigorously control. My mom had little time to herself and little patience for anything or anyone who disrupted the flow of either sphere. Growing up in our home there were times when my sister feared her…times when I simply did not like her. To be sure, she was a force…but somewhere along the line, something changed…things became different…she was different.

I cannot mark the point of time or circumstance of this change. It may only be my own maturity, but to my eye, this change coincided with the birth of her first grandchild, Emily. Suddenly or incrementally my mom was the warm, loving, generous person that we now know. Where in her children she could see flaws, or reflections of her own inadequacies, in her grandchildren she saw none.

Things became simpler then, distilled to the essence. She embraced an idealized view of the world, of her family, of friends, of many things, and simply altered her persona to fit within that ideal. While she had little time for her children growing up, she had unlimited time to dote on her grandchildren, and in recent years, her God-grandchildren. She became “HaHa” to her oldest grandchild and to all the grandchildren that followed and to all of their friends. Yesterday we received a note from my oldest son’s closest childhood friend now studying in Wu Han, China, telling us how sad he was having heard the news. He loved HaHa.
That love and generosity extended to others as well.

When my mother died on Saturday, one of the first things that my sister and I had to do was to bring the news to my mother’s 99 year old aunt. Up until just a couple of years ago, our Aunt Daisy lived independently but with help, despite being deaf for more than 80 years. My mother was that help and caregiver for at least the last 15 years and probably longer before the death of my grandmother with whom Daisy lived. Not surprisingly, my aunt took the news hard, announcing that with Selma’s death, half of her had died as well. While we were meeting with Daisy, somehow the word of my mother’s death spread throughout the nursing home and in short order we were surrounded by a circle of other women, half of whom were in wheelchairs. Anita, Ruth, people who we did not know, who we had not met, women who came to tell us how sad they were, how much they loved our mother, how much they would miss our mother, because unbeknownst to us, my mother had provided support and become a caregiver to them as well. We should not have been surprised.

I am reminded by one of my friends that we are not truly grown up until we are orphans. I am now grown up.
What a world we live in and how different it has become in the 83 years that my mother was in it.

In this world, I was able to stand by my wife’s side to watch the birth of each of my three children and to hear their first breaths. I have stood by my mother’s side and heard her last.

In these last months my mother would tell me how much she and I were alike. I look at my sister and see much more of my mother in her. I see my father repeated in me. I look at my children and see much of me and their mother in them. My sister and her children the same.

Three days ago I watched my mother take her last breath, but my mother lives forever in me, and in my sister, and in her children, and in mine, and in time she will live in theirs.

Que Mujer!

Eulogy 01/13/2009 by Art Shulman

A number of years ago Robert Redford had an affair with Brazilian beauty and activist Sonja Braga – when asked why he was with her he replied simply, “Que Mujer – What a woman!”

If there is a better way to describe my mother-in-law I’m not aware of it.     

Nevertheless, I do have a few other observations to make…

To start, I must tell you that in all of MY years on the planet, the single most intense interpersonal encounter I ever had was with Selma just 3 days before Joanne and I were married. The details aren’t important, but it was then that we forged our unwritten agreement that she would get her way 97% of the time no questions asked, but the 3% percent of the time that something was very important to me, I was granted the right to at least present my case. I am convinced that these are the most advantageous terms anyone ever negotiated with her in all of her 83 years.

When you’re talking larger than life, you’re talkin’ Selma Musman. Yet when I reflect upon her and our relationship, it isn’t the toughness of her personality, and believe me it was there, but rather the warmth and love for her friends and family that shines through.

She was tough as nails yet sweet as sugar. To this day it is a mystery to me how both of these attributes resided in 1 person.

She was single minded and ALWAYS did what she thought was right, and at times did not allow the facts to get in her way. She did whatever it took to protect her brood. She was direct to a fault and knew her mind. Not only did she know HER mind, she also shared it with everyone else.

Having “married off” our oldest daughter in late August, weddings have been much on our minds recently. This plus Selma’s passing caused me to reflect upon a picture from Joanne’s and my wedding of Selma and me on the dance floor… I looked young and dashing – Selma was wearing a helmet of tall hair and shellac. She had her finger in my face and her mouth open. I frankly don’t remember what she was telling me at that particular moment but I’m highly confident that she was instructing me on something. This was a pattern that would continue for 35 years… and in fact only ended Saturday.

Selma fit perfectly in our post 9/11 world, as security was always a top concern of hers. From leaving the kitchen radio blaring to frighten would be burglars, to an array of locks that would make Fort Knox proud, Selma trusted no one where security was concerned. In fact she didn’t trust me when we went out one evening leaving the house Joanne and I were renting in NJ and  I assured Selma that the door was locked. Unbeknownst to us she decided to lock the bottom lock of the front door. Unfortunately we didn’t have a key to that lock and I was forced to borrow a ladder from a neighbor that I hadn’t even met so that I could climb up and break in the second story window. It was like a Jimmy Cagney or Humphrey Bogart movie – “Mother-in-law’s paranoia turns renter into second story man”.

Selma had a number of great love affairs in her life… One of her greatest was with food. Not so much with feeding herself, but with feeding others.

• My future wife didn’t warn me before my first visit to Selma’s home… The result? I gained 11 pounds in 9 days!
• Dinner for 8?  10 steaks and 3 whole chickens.
• Cooking for a group? Make sure there is enough so that if the French Foreign Legion happens to stop by, everyone will get at least a nosh.
• “No more for me” was a phrase that evaporated into the either and led to one of her finest magic tricks, as she would make food appear on your plate 90 seconds after you had turned down 4^ths for the third time.
• Her dying wishes were that today there should be no crying, lots of laughs, the Shiva should be held at her clubhouse, and there must be lots of food.
• Who wants eggs???!!!

To me her defining trait was her outsized ability to strike up friendships, both casual, and those lasting decades. This was certainly one of her greatest gifts: Friendship for the sake of friendship. Her need and ability to wrap her arms around people knew no bounds.

• From the “girls in the beauty parlor” to the postman, to friends of 50 and even 60 years – friends didn’t come more loyal than Selma Musman.
• Syd and my mom both passed away about 10 years ago and although my dad and Selma had not spent that much time together, the passing of their spouses and the commonality of their love for us drew them together, and they became great telephone buddies, she in Boston and my dad in Fort Lauderdale. 

What truly drove her was the natural extension of this astounding ability to form and maintain friendships and that is the love and protection of her family.

• She was the reconciler in chief: Nothing bothered her more (and believe me plenty of things bothered her) than dissention within the family. That she could often be the center of such dissention was never really the point.
• While writing this I jotted down Aunt Daisy’s name, for one can’t really talk about Selma without addressing her relationship with Daisy. If you step back and view that particular relationship as a microcosm of Selma’s life, the picture that emerges is one of support, and how totally integrated Daisy was into Selma’s life, and that of our family.
• Considering all of her achievements, and there are plenty, undoubtedly her greatest was that of being one of the world’s great grandmothers. I won’t dwell on this because there just isn’t time, but I can assure you, there are very, very few who did this better than Ha Ha Musman.
• We were blessed with sharing many years not only with Syd and Selma, but also Selma’s mom Celia: Granny who would come visit us in Chicago when the kids were little. She also left us a heart full of memories, and it’s obvious that the apple did not fall far from the tree.

There are, of course, many other observations to note; for this is Selma Musman we are talking about.

• Creating a home that outside of a nuclear facility is one of the cleanest environments known to mankind.
• Possessing incredible perception, especially about your weak spots, with a unique ability to throw salt right into their epicenter.
• Maintaining one of the few homes in North America with a fireplace that was painted white on the inside as well as the outside.

• Selma was never a peaceful woman; she was always on the lookout for trouble and had an edge as sharp as the finest samurai’s sword with antenna as sharp as a bat’s sonar. But, I can happily say that over past years she had mellowed dramatically, and it suited her well after a lifetime of living on the edge. There is no question in my mind that as the years rolled by she found a different way to face life – one that did not always require a flak jacket.
• She was generous to a fault and fearless to the very end.

Yesterday morning I finished a novel by a favorite author, Mark Helprin. I was introduced to this writer by Joanne’s brother Jeffrey. As I finished the last two paragraphs, I realized that I had just read the perfect ending to this eulogy and I want to share it with you now.

Though my life might have been more interesting and eventful, and I might have been a better person, after all these years I think I can say that I have kept faith.

All this time, my heart has told me nothing but to love and protect. The message has been strong through the twists and turns, and it has never varied. To protect, and to protect, and to protect. I was born to protect the ones I love. And may God continue to give me ways to protect and serve them, even though I will be gone.

Que Mujer! What a woman!