My mother

The easiest thing my mother ever did was die.

I say this with love and affection -- and with the knowledge that her 84 years minus 12 days were, like those of so many of her contemporaries, not easy.

When she was 3 years old her father was killed in a hunting accident. When she was 16 her mother died. The loss of both parents came at Christmas. She could barely stand the festivities associated with the holiday.

Because she grew up during the Great Depression, my mother, like your relatives who lived through those rough years, was frugal in so many ways. And because she scrimped and saved, she was able to use some of her quarters and dimes to help others. Dozens of college students never knew where the anonymous $10 bills came from, other than the postmark. Some young girls got to take piano lessons because of my mother -- like the retired schoolteacher who played so beautifully at the end of my mother's funeral.

Education was always important to my mother. When my grandmother died, my mother was in her senior year of high school. My mother went to live with her older brother and his family, but she had already taken all the courses offered by the high school in that town. So school officials helped her enroll, before she graduated from high school, in a nearby junior college. She spent a year in the junior college before funds ran out. She moved to St. Louis to earn a living.

Among other things, my mother was a quality-control inspector at an ammunition plant. My wife called her "Rosie the riveter" after hearing this story for the first time just a couple of years ago. My mother also was secretary to the owner of the Yellow Cab Co. in St. Louis, a man who later served as mayor. My mother moved to Florida when she was pregnant with me in order to be closer to my father, who was serving in the Navy and who was aboard ship for months at a time, far from Florida.

After she remarried and moved to the farm in Killough Valley, my mother decided to go back to the junior college and complete enough hours to teach in one-room schools. She taught in five schools, including the one she had attended, the one named for her ancestor buried near her parents.

When she went to work for the Brown Shoe Co. factory in my favorite hometown, she never dreamed she would not only become its office manager but would be the first woman to hold a management position in the entire company.

In recent years, she dealt with her own health problems as well as the deaths of her husband and of my younger brother.

My mother didn't believe in the Golden Years. But she trusted with all her faith in the Golden Streets of Heaven, where she prayed daily she could go -- express, please -- without any stops in hospitals or nursing homes. God answered her prayers one night last week when she went to sleep and didn't wake up.

It's difficult to describe a mother's real personality without getting all gooey, but let me give you a glimpse of who she was.

At her funeral -- a full-blown Baptist affair with two duets and full-of-passion, honest-to-goodness preaching -- the minister said my mother would be busy in heaven seeking out the likes of the apostle Paul. I whispered to my wife, "And the first thing she would say is, 'You're a lot shorter than I imagined.'"

After the service, the wife of a distant cousin said, "You know, a funny thought ran through my mind during the sermon. When the preacher was talking about your mother looking for Paul in heaven, I imagined the first thing she would say to him: 'Goodness, don't you ever shave?'"

We both laughed and laughed. My mother would have laughed too. Despite her hard life, that's what everyone remembers about her: that laugh. And all those smiles she lavished on babies and small children. Heaven is full of both. That's who will get her attention. St. Paul might have to wait a spell.

R. Joe Sullivan is the editor of the Southeast Missourian.