For better or worse, here is what my eulogy for my mom was on Oct 5, 2019.
There a thousand little things I could tell you about Ginny. She loved candy, and hid it from us kids, but she was absolutely terrible at hiding things. She loved a beautiful garden but really didn’t like gardening. Trilliums and freesias were her favorite flowers. She loved PBS and channel nine and and “ Masterpiece Theater”. She had a fascination for certain discussion topics; “What’s going on in out in space?” she would ask me, as if I had just come back from there, and we would talk about recent NASA flybys of Jupiter, or of the rovers on Mars. That type of thing made her day to talk about. Maybe she still wants to be an astronaut when she grows up.
The things that made up Virginia Nell McCallum Sander Anderson were fascinating, mundane, sweet, occasionally contradictory but always, always kind. Ginny was born on Valentine’s day, February 14, 1923. Her Birthentine Valensday her family called it. She was the fourth child, and only daughter of Nellie Perkins and Clifford McCallum. Her brothers, Donald, Hugh and Mal were all much older than Ginny, so her’s was a very special spot in their family. Her father Cliff, was a Seattle native who used to tell the story of watching the great Seattle fire of 1887 as a young boy from his family home on Queen Anne hill. He became an engineer, mostly designing ships with the Skinner and Eddy Shipyards. He also helped design the bridge mechanism for the Montlake Bridge in the U district. -Many times being late to something ,I have grumbled about the bridge being up and my grand father’s collaboration with my tardiness. - Ginny’s mother Nellie, who my family knew very well as our Nana, was wonderful and strong woman, whose detailed plans for her daughter’s life made an indelible impact on my mom. Nellie’s father had abandoned his family in Seattle while he went off to Alaskan gold fields. He never returned and her family had to make it on their own. So Nellie, despite her gentle nature, was made of some very tough stuff. She had her reasons for wanting to see her daughter succeed.
The legend was that Mom sat down at a piano when she was three and was upset that she couldn’t play it. Nellie decided then and there that this was Ginny’s true calling and that nothing would stand in the way of it. Mom began lessons at 3. The next twenty some years of her life were defined by that instrument, for better or worse. She went on to play the piano throughout her school years, at Lincoln High School, at the University of Washington where she graduated cum laude from the music dept. She gave recitals and was a sought after accompanist. She often told us that while she loved playing and felt it was important to her, she also felt she missed out on certain parts of childhood.
Mom met my dad, Ned Sander, in high school. Dad told the story that as the Lincoln High School stage manager it was his job to set up the grand piano for Ginny McCallum, the pretty pianist who he was too shy to talk to. They met again at the University of Washington, dated, and got engaged, all during World War two. Dad left for the war in Europe shortly after they got married. I have read some of his letters home to her. Frankly, they are kind of embarrassing- boy, was that guy in love, and was he ever excited about coming home. And why wouldn’t he be? Ginny was beautiful, smart and talented. Of course after V-E day, the army sent dad was sent to Japan for a year.
But, love wins: mom and dad had four kids: Joani, Bill, Dean and Jim- Ginny became a home-maker, stay at home mom, a housewife. She gave up her personal dreams, whatever they might have been, for us. I think we need to recognize that, not just through the lens of our present world where women have more opportunity and expectation of a career. I look at her granddaughters and see women with careers and wonder what she could have been had she been born 70 years later. Ginny gave up a lot of herself to be her kids’ full time mother. I asked her many times, and she said she never regretted it. I think about what we were all like as teenagers and I wonder.
When Dad died, too young and much too early, mom was a little lost, as anyone would be. I really think she wanted to go to work and find herself in the greater world but felt she was needed at home. It was 1972, she was forty nine years old with a ten year old still at home; what women did in those days was get remarried. She married an old friend from Lincoln High, Bud Anderson. They spent over 40 years together. Their relationship was sometimes difficult and hard for us kids to understand, but they were a unit, and we as a family came to love Bud in his own right. As the youngest kid, by 8 years, I spent a lot of time with just the two of them. I like to think that I got to know them both pretty well as people and not just as parental authority figures. They were both pretty fun. I liked them as people. I am not sure everyone gets to say that about their parents. There were good years filled with travel and grandchildren. They had six grandchildren in all, and they both loved them very much. She read a lot, had friends and activities. She spent thirty years volunteering at the Children’s Orthopedic Hospital Thrift shop, she did it until she couldn’t make change anymore on account of her eyesight.
Mom fought depression through out her life, and had moments where she could be prickly, but generally she did not let those moments define her. She tried to be there for us and to always project a positive outlook, even when she might not ultimately feel that way. That must have been hard. There were times that drove us crazy: I remember getting beat up by the third grade bully and she seemed to take his side - “you must have done something, or maybe he was having a bad day?”, which you really didn’t want to hear. She tried to see the other side even in every argument. Trying to make lemonade from some really rotten lemons in the eyes of a 9 year old.
While we were sitting with her in her last few days, Bill asked me my favorite mom story. That was easy. I had taken her car to school and was going to drive it home for lunch. Lunchtime came around and I went out to the high school parking lot, the car was gone. Another car parked in its space. Panicked I ran to the office to report that my mom’s Volkswagen had been stolen. I called home. T0 the young people out there, this was an ancient time before cellphones. No answer. The people at school started to call the police. I called home again. Mom answered. “ Mom! the car’s gone! Somebody took it” “Oh no I needed it. I went and got it. “ Long pause. “ I left a note!” I went back to the spot where I had been parked, and under that car that had taken my space, in the middle of the asphalt stall was a 3x5 note that said that“Took the car! Love Mom”
In her last few months, I asked if she had a favorite memory. She thought about it and came back quickly with an answer and it was the certainty of it that surprised me -she said she was accompanist to a young woman, a dancer from the UW who was touring small towns in Eastern Washington, during the war. It sounded like cultural barnstorming to rural Washington. She said the dancer was very talented and the music was beautiful and the countryside was inspiring. She made it sound like it was just the two of them and that they had enjoyed the invigorating freedom of it all. The image of eastern Washington of the 1940s, the wheat fields and vistas, of small town school auditoriums and a dancer, dancing to the music mom played so passionately. It was kind of a shock. I had never heard this story- I had figured she would say something about life with my dad or travels with Bud, or us kids, but this is what she chose; proving that even your own mom is fairly unknowable in her deepest heart sometimes. It was surprising and gratifying that she had at least a taste of that sort of limitlessness and freedom of the world, a world that the years of piano scales and practice might have denied her. Part of me wonders if it really happened, that maybe she was confusing dreams with reality, but I guess it doesn’t matter- I hope it was a beautiful memory. It certainly painted for me, a fresh picture of an amazing woman , a woman who was the first person I ever knew in this world. Someone who loved us unconditionally.
