Condolence: My mother's eulogy:

Before I talk about my mother, I’d like to thank my brother, Greg Fox, for all of his amazing work to create this memorial event for our mother. He did a spectacular job and I was very impressed. Kiddo, you’re now in charge of mine!

Also, Please let me thank Al Bornt and the NHFD not only for this event but for 13 years of faithful service to my family and being part of our extended family in so many ways. *

Pastor Mike, thank you for everything you have done for our family and your congregation since Greg was a toddler and for your unbelievable donations of time and emotional resources for those in and out of your faith during this difficult time.

And to Bonnie and Dave who have been family to my mother, Gregory, myself and my partners for over five years now and who were hands on during her first medical crisis of her massive stroke 5 years ago and have offered substantial amounts of their lives to helping me support Gregory to be able to get established to live on his own.

And to Coach Lilac, brother-in-law to our local hometown hero, Michael Hickey. Coach Lilac took Gregory under his wing when Greg’s dad first got cancer years ago. Coach Lilac essentially adopted Gregory and has offered him the chance to have a strong role model through his teenage and junior college years.

To the Danforth and HF Health and Rehab Center staffs who employed and took care of my mother for the last 20 years with unmatchable kindness and understanding.
The above mentioned people are the key players in what makes growing up in Hoosick Falls make one realize that even if your family weren’t part of the local tribes or the settlers, that if you grew up here, there is a network here for you and as a member of this town there are resources to create a feeling of extended family – even when there is fighting among the members.

But now it’s time to talk about my mother. Jeannie.
I spent a lot of time reflecting on her as a person and my relationship with her at so many different times in my life as I thought about how to address delivering her eulogy. Since I write papers and give talks professionally, I used similar tactics to pull it together – I looked to create something that would do justice to my mother, draw on my expertise and address the expectations of my audience and allow myself to show some emotion, but not too much and keep myself together up here…

My mother knew or was known by almost any who lived in Hoosick Falls up until 5 years ago when we moved her into the local health care facility. My mother would say hello to anyone, be friendly, smile and engage anyone who would spend time with her. My mother tried to be nice to everyone she met. But only a very few select people really knew anything about my mother. Even all the amazing people above who have been such a rich part of Gregory’s life, very few of them had the opportunity to spend much time with my mother.

I’d like to share some things about my mother that very few people would have the opportunity to appreciate. Things that of course, now upon reflection, I should have flow home from Phoenix last week to say to her, that I should have contemplated before now on how to share with her. So please allow me to honor her for sharing them with her community.

My thoughts all revolve around the concept of resiliency. My mother is probably one of the most resilient people I have met in my life. I have learned by example and by living a good amount of her life with her how to have an incredible resiliency as well. I however, have not been as accepting of my life as my mother tried to be of hers and that has been both good and bad for each of our lives. So in the true sense that we learn from and despite of each other, my mother and I learned from each other and helped each other the best we knew how and also at times needed to protect ourselves from each other. I am glad that she lived long enough to see me parent 2 teenagers. I am glad that I did take the time to apologize to her for being ‘very 16’ at a few moments during my high school years that were quite unkind to her. For those of you who remember me growing up in Hoosick Falls, many have you have seen me come around a lot more since her stroke 5 years ago to help her and Greg and more than one have you have taken the opportunity to tell me that you always saw me as a ‘go getter’ and also a ‘handful.’ In that way, you can imagine I was like that at home too and mom often had a hard time keeping up with me.

My mom was born in 1948 to immigrant Grandparents. Her mother is still alive and a great joy and delight and one of the sweetest, kindest people you’d ever want to me. She’s also filled with mischievousness and craftiness. My mother’s father was brilliant and helped invent impressive things for military subcontractors during the initial space race era. My mother was their first born and due to a pre-natal accident, my mother was born prematurely and with disabilities. Her early treatments caused additional complications. Due to the practices at the time, only her physical limitations were addressed and her socio-cognitive and intellectual issues weren’t realized for much of her life. It was clear that from just after birth, my mother’s vision was severely impaired and she was made a pair of glasses at the age of 2 ½ that according to my grandmother were very advanced for her at that time and not done for a child so young. Even with the glasses, it was difficult for my mother to have depth perception and she had a hard time walking and not being clumsy. I am totally her daughter in that way. I can barely walk across a room without falling down, am terrible at organized sports and dancing and drop almost everything I pick up.
My mother also had cognitive issues that made it difficult for her to fit in and work and have friends and made it difficult to be part of a family because she needed so much regular help and support and didn’t understand some key things. However, my mother was also brilliant, but her incredible intelligence was unbalanced in ways that made it hard to show others how bright she was. My mother could remember facts as if she was a walking encyclopedia. She could count cards and won games easily. She could anticipate analytical outcomes and number-crunch with the best of them. But my mother lacked the ability to meaningfully apply these skills in balanced ways. However, if she got excited about something, she would show incredibly impressive outcomes.

Let me tell you about some of my mother’s accomplishments.

Many of them are craft and hobby related. By doing crafts and hobbies instead of being career oriented, she was allowed to go as slow or fast as she needed to in the various areas to be able to gain a mastery. Once she mastered a craft, she quickly became bored with it and would move on to the next thing.

When I was a toddler, her craft passion was making things out of clothespins – I really was pretty impressed with the crucifix she made for my grandmother all out of clothespins.

Then she moved into shell patterns on boxes and created really beautiful intricately designed patterns.

After that it was learning to color balance with felted paint pens.

She also played with words a lot and when I was very little she started rewriting ‘Twas the Night Before Xmas’ to cover the family antics our crew had been through each year like broken pipes at the farm, horses escaped from the pastures and more family bonding memories that are more fun to remember than to experience. The poems were all great fun and we all looked forward to seeing where our name would be placed each year and how she’d make us all laugh.

Before I entered school, my first-step father was an artist working for a stained glass shop and a family friend did mosaics and my mother started creating mosaics. Her best pieces are the ones in our family farmhouse that has a scene for my grandmother’s homeland of Puerto Rico that transitions into one of my grandfather’s homeland of Holland.

Then we moved to Hoosick Falls to live at Hoosac School at first and she learned everything she could about Grandma Moses and tried her hand at folk painting. At the time my step-father Michael Griffin, a very talented artist, had been the first one commissioned to paint the Grandma Moses mural downtown. While he worked on that, my mother created her best piece, which was the back door of our family farm that was always a nice personal touch and greeting to everyone that came ‘home.’ Just as that mural is for many of us when we come through town.

Later we moved into town and lived in many apartments in and out of town until she divorced and remarried Bill Fox ‘Foxy.’ During that time she worked for a year at St. Mary’s Academy school library when I was a student there. After marrying Foxy he worked for Greg Zora when Backstreets bar first opened and my brother Greg was named after Foxy’s respect for Greg as a boss. He helped us open a diner in N. Hoosick called Golden’s. Thank you to both Jean’s place and the Falls Diner for being partner businesses to us at the time and for coming to us to offer to help provide food for today’s event – so very sweet of you and yet another example of how even competing businesses in this town support each other for life.

With my second step-father, my mother spent almost 20 years not doing crafts but learning about antique toys and honing her skills for finding interesting pieces and looking for better pieces for her collection. They did this with their good friends the Spicers. This allowed her so many things that we great for her. She had a lot of fun and did create an impressive collection of early Disney, Dionne Quintuplets, Shirley Temple and Barbie pieces. She also learned some important skills in managing a small business that allowed her mathematical skills to shine but still had the support of her husband to help interact with others. Foxy was one of the happiest people I ever met and in that way he and my mother were perfectly compatible and I envied their attitudes to always make the best of things. My mother cherished him above everything and I never saw her try to push herself so hard as she did to be a good partner to him and have him be proud of their son.

My mother’s last craft passion for the past 25 years has been scrapbooking. It would never get old to her as there were always new things to document, record, capture. My mother took thousands of pictures a month once she got a digital camera. She printed unbelievable amounts of pictures for people and made the scrapbooks. She would never say no. When she had her stroke it was very difficult to give the 10 people with requests for her to make the scrapbooks back their family memories untouched. When she recovered enough from her stroke to remember things from before the stroke, one of her concerns were peoples pictures.

Thank you for all of you who were able to be her friend on deeper levels, she enjoyed many years of deep friendship with Sherri Bowman, Peggy Callahan, Bob & Gail Spicer, Linda Miller and Bonnie and Dave Lampron.

So please, before you leave today, enjoy her gifts to all of us and back to this community of all the photo documentation she has done of what life meant to her. Much of it is things that made her happy, family, antiques, hot air balloons and sparkly glittery things.

And take three things from my mother with you
1. More resilience
2. More acceptance
3. More happiness

*The NHFD hosted my mother's Jeannie Fox's memorial yesterday as my brother Greg Fox is a 13 year member of that department. After they did an amazing job for our family with what looked like the whole department showing up to support us, they got a call that evening in negative 5 degree weather to evacuate the elder center where my mother and step-father worked for 15 years and take 68 residents in for the evening. THIS is HOOSICK, where people like Alan Bornt don't rest when others are in need or even want. We asked that people donate to them for hosting my mother's memorial and I will ask again to support this incredible group of volunteers.