Remembrance

Daughter Karen’s Eulogy

June 15, 2019

Hello everyone. Thank you so much for joining us today to celebrate my mother’s life. It means so much to me and to my family to have you here with us. We are blessed to have many members of that family here with us today. Most of you know my father Norman Bardsley. My sister Lynn is here with her husband Kevin and their three children: Keith, Brie and Megan. My brother Craig is here from England. His wife Jen could not make it as their daughters, Cerys and Aislin, are still in school. However, they are all here both in spirit and, frequently this weekend, in Skype. Jen’s parents, Paul and Carolyn Hiller are here today. As our closest relatives, geographically speaking, they knew mom well and have hosted more family dinners and celebrations than I can count. I also want to recognize my girlfriend Kathryn, who has been an incredible support to me these past few weeks.

Thank you also to San Francisco friends for being here for me, and thanks to all of you who have come here from so many different parts of mom’s life. I see friends from her churches, from her poetry groups, from her work in the Parkinson’s community and from her years here as an active member of her California community. Truly, my mother was loved, and she would have been so honored to see so many of you here today.

My mother was born Jacqueline Lockhart on November 30, 1941, in a small village in southern England. Her father was an instrument repairman in the RAF, so mom and her younger sister Andy spent their first few years living next to airbases. In fact, my mom’s mother, my Nanna, used to complain about pilots who delighted in flying low enough to blow her daughters diapers from the washing line.

After D-Day, my grandfather was deployed to Europe. Nanna, who had, one could say, a unique approach to life, thought the Blitz created the perfect opportunity for her to realize her dream of moving to London, and so my mother’s first memories were somewhat unusual: her mother ushering her and Andy away from the windows because the “coal man” was coming to pour coal down the building’s metal chute, a ruse Nanna used to explain away the noises and shaking produced by bombing raids, the feel of her mother’s hand clamping down sharply on her head to stop her from going out to a backyard that contained an unexploded bomb, the sight of parachuting “mushroom men” drifting down in the sky, the noise and the flickering lights from the massive VE day street party that Mom and Andy watched from their doorway, but which they were too young to join.

Eventually, my grandfather returned from Europe. My mother remembered meeting him for what she felt was the first time. She was nervous and scared. However, he quickly won her over. It helped that he gave her a banana, the first she had ever seen. It also helped that my grandfather was the gentlest of men, with the sweetest, most melodious, Cumbrian accent, an impish sense of humor, and a love of art, music and literature which would shape the rest of my mother’s life.

Growing up in London during the late forties and early fifties was not easy. They lived in the East End of the city in a village called Blackheath, which was named after the large green space that it bordered. Large sections of the East End had been destroyed by German bombing and mom remembered how the once rolling heath was rendered almost completely level by the burial of debris from the bombsites. It was also a time of continued food rationing as the UK struggled to recover economically from the war. Food was often in short supply in my grandparent’s household, though they grew vegetables and kept chickens in their small back garden. Mom remembered times when she came home from school to find there was only an onion for her tea (a fact that she often recalled when trying to get her own children to clean their plates). My grandparents sometimes sent Jackie and Andy to their grandparent’s house in rural Surrey. This may have been a way to improve their diets, but it also helped nurture my mother’s passion for the English countryside and for the natural world in general.

My mother’s childhood was not the easiest, but she was a bright, fun-loving and independent child. Eventually, my grandparents had two more children, my Uncle Bob and Aunty Nessa. Jackie became the glamourous older sister that her younger siblings looked up to. These were the years of Britain’s post war socialism, and mom received an excellent education at the Roan school for girls in Greenwich, where she developed a close circle of friends that she kept for her entire life.

After high school, Jackie attended Homerton, a teaching college in Cambridge. She wanted to teach English, but her headmistress told her “Britain is paying for your education and Britain needs math and science teachers,” and so that is what she trained to become. In October of 1960, she met my father while engaged in the cut-throat intercollegiate sport of Tiddlywinks. Perhaps not the most auspicious of beginnings to a relationship, but maybe the romantic potential of the game is underrated, as my parents were married after graduation in 1964.

Jackie started married life in Manchester, where my father was getting his PhD. She taught both elementary and high school students, and she absolutely loved teaching. However, she put her teaching career on hold in 1968 when my father got a post doc in America at the University of Pittsburgh. My sister, Lynn, was born in 1969, and almost immediately my father moved the family across the country to take up a research opportunity in Austin, TX. Thus, began an 18 year stretch of our family moving back and forth across the country every couple of years, though my parents always managed to return to Pittsburgh to have their children, a nesting pattern that included my birth there in ‘71 and Craig’s in ‘74.

Despite the disruptions caused by my father’s career as a travelling physicist, to look through our family photo albums is to see a record of three very happy childhoods. As Dad will agree, most of this joy was nurtured by my mother. She made sure we never wanted for anything. She kept us safe, made our clothes, taught us songs and games. We were the lucky recipients of her immensely creative energy and imagination. I could talk for hours about the birthday cakes alone, not to mention the handmade Christmas ornaments, stockings and decorations, the pressed sugar Easter eggs that contained magical woodland scenes inside, the remarkable Halloween costumes that sometimes stretched the limits of the practical (I recall one year in the 1980’s going door to door dressed as the QE2, not the monarch, the famous ocean liner).

As we grew, our personalities were shaped in Mom’s image. She gave us a love of learning, both inside and outside of school, taking us to and impressive array of after school activities, sports and classes and willingly helping all our endeavors and projects. Thanks to our frequent trips to Europe to visit relatives and our tours of America to show those same relatives our parents’ new home country, all three of us have an openness to travel, a love of natural spaces and a fascination with history.

We also benefitted from a sense of freedom that might seem a bit outrageous by today’s standards of parenting. After school we roamed our neighborhoods unsupervised, walking or biking for miles to visit friends or the town’s store, to spend our allowance on Smurfs, scratch and sniff stickers, or whatever else the craze of the day might be. When it was time for dinner, mom would simply summon us home by repeatedly banging a gong at the back door.

Of course, I must mention our parents’ gift of our very British senses of humor. I remember the excitement and confusion we felt one night when we were allowed to stay up late to watch a very special historical program, a “documentary” that turned out to be an episode of Monty Python’s Flying Circus. That night put the phrase “And now for something completely different” firmly into the family lexicon. British comedic radio and television programs were a constant feature of our weekly entertainments. I am proud to say that this legacy has been proudly passed on to all five of Jackie and Norman’s grandchildren.

Lynn, Craig and I have so many fond memories of my mother, but perhaps the most treasured of all involve the hundreds of hours she spent reading to us. From Little Mommy, Goodnight, Moon, Gus the Bug and hundreds of other picture books, we rapidly made the jump to “chapter” books: Anne of Green Gables, The Hobbit, Five Children and It, Little Women, What Katy-Did, Water Babies, Jenny, Little House on the Prairie, The Chronicles of Narnia and so many more. Jackie had such a lovely voice, and her words were always an invitation. An invitation to cuddle close, to pay attention and to let our imaginations draw us in to the book’s world. Frequently, the stories and characters would drive our play for days on end. Thus, we all caught her enthusiasm for the written word, so much so that we find it completely natural to leave on a vacation with at least one, half-empty suitcase ready for the books that will be bought along the way.

There was never any doubt that my mother had a great love of, and talent for, the English language. We were all excited when she went back to university to pursue her love of literature and poetry. In fact, one of the happiest days of my childhood was my first day as a latch key kid, and not just because I snuck myself an extra cookie for my snack. It was so thrilling to hear the joy in my Mom’s voice when she came home and described how her day at school went. It was so inspiring to see her come into her own and to watch her develop her abilities as an author and a poet.

You see, it is important to remember that Jackie was so much more than a loving and nurturing daughter, sibling, wife, mother, grandmother and friend. She was an incredible person in her own right, and she had so much to say about the world and to the world. In fact, when PSP, her Parkinson’s syndrome, eventually robbed her of her physical voice, she drove us all crazy by refusing to respond to questions with yes/no responses. Instead, she would mouth full sentences, challenging us to slow down and carefully attend to what she was saying, to think about the situation, to try to figure out her point of view. Even then, her whispered words were an invitation.

That why it is so fitting that Jackie has left us such a rich legacy of her poetry. Here is language meant to be read slowly and to be reflected upon. Each poem, like mom’s life, is an invitation to embrace language, to think critically about another’s point of view, to employ our own powers of creative imagination. With these skills, we can all see the world anew and revel in its glory and its complexity and contradictions. Truly, there is an end in every beginning and a beginning in every end. As Jackie taught us, at any stage of life and in any circumstances there are opportunities for rethinking, reworking and reinvention.

And so, as we say goodbye to Jacqueline, we express our deepest gratitude for all she has given us and for her loving, inspiring and lasting invitation to continue living to the fullest.

Thank you once again for being here today to help us thank my mother and to take her memory forward into the future.