Mary Lou Glassburn's Memorial Or: Officiating My Grandparent's Funerals in 2020
Do you want to lie to the children or do you want to be honest with them? How about they end up discovering everything they need to in their own time? That’s pretty wild, right? It’s with that mentality in mind that I share what I wrote for my Grandma’s memorial service.
I will also remind you that what follows is not the family story that my closest living family wants told. This is not the story that I was told and that I had heard told countless times. This is the story that I learned myself.
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Mary Lou Glassburn passed away peacefully on December 11th, 2019 while under hospice care in San Luis Obispo, CA.
Mary Lou came from a different time, a different generation. She was loyal and devoted. To her husband. To her family. To her God. She was born August 2nd, 1929 to Olive and Leonard Crager of Saint Paul, Kansas. She was the youngest of four children. She wasn’t raised by her mother. Her mother died when she was two years old of scoliosis. Mary Lou always remembered not being allowed to see her mother due to the disorder. She was raised by her father and her grandmother. Mary Lou always remembered something else from this time. Sleeping on her dad’s hard muscled arm. This caused her to never sleep with a pillow, as she prefered something firm, not soft, under her head.
Soon after Mary Lou graduated high school she married the love of her life, Roy “Leon” Glassburn, and they got married June 1st, 1948, after he returned from World War 2. Not long after they had three children: Cherri, their first born, Johnny, their middle child and only boy, and Mary Beth, the baby who would be their last. Having three children and raising them was Mary Lou’s proudest accomplishment in life. Shortly after the births of their children, the whole family moved from Kansas to sunny California in 1955.
California is where Mary Lou spent the rest of her life. She worked on a lunch truck. She got robbed at gunpoint working on it. She was a homemaker. She attended to the needs of her husband and her family. She made everything picturesque. In 1959 the family moved to Moorpark where Roy took a teaching position at the local high school and Mary Lou was a part time teacher’s assistant for disabled children.
On August 27th, 1977 Johnny Glassburn, her only son, died in a motorcycle accident. This changed the family. In 1978 Mary Lou and her husband Roy moved to San Luis Obispo, CA. Roy began having an affair with another woman. Johnny’s death broke the family, and it was being torn apart.
But Mary Beth, Mary Lou’s youngest daughter, knew what to do. Since Johnny left everyone too soon, she would bring him back. On August 30, 1982, five years to the day of Johnny’s funeral, Mary Beth did her best to bring Johnny back. She gave birth to a baby boy and named him after Johnny. And it worked. The birth of this new Johnny brought the family back together. Roy quit having his affair and started staying at home. The family rallied around the birth of what would be Mary Lou’s one and only grandchild.
Things had gotten back to how everyone thought they should be. The family was back together. But the unexpected still occurred. Mary Beth ended up becoming mentally ill. The actual cause and reason and even illness itself remains a mystery. The consensus says she developed brain damage after a car accident in the early 1970s. And that schizophrenia might have been one of the illnesses. This turned into a nineteen year battle between Roy and various doctors, facilities, hospitals, organizations and mental health care. Nothing came of these battles, and Mary Lou’s youngest daughter slowly deteriorated until her passing on Oct 11th, 2005.
Through all of this, Mary Lou remained strong and unchanged. She attended the needs of her husband. She attended the needs of her home. She attended the needs of her daughter. She attended the needs of her grandchild. It was as if attending to other people's needs was attending to her own needs. Her own needs being to help other people with theirs.
At her core, that is what she was. Unwavering internal strength and a rock solid helper. Always there with a kind word, food, some kind of offering. The kindest, gentlest person you could possibly imagine.
As important as her husband and family, was her religion. Mary Lou was a Catholic and always went to church every Sunday. When Mary Lou’s age was getting the best of her, and ‘sit-stand-kneel’ became a quick path to light-headedness, a parishioner would come by and visit Mary Lou where she lived, and would give her her communion and pray with her.
Mary Lou was preceded in death by her parents, three brothers, son Johnny Glassburn, daughter Mary Beth Smith and husband Roy Glassburn. She is survived by her daughter C, son-in-law N and grandson Johnny Smith.
Mary Lou was known for her kindness, generosity, compassion, empathy, cooking and immense patience. Whomever met her developed a love and respect for her. Her greatest joy was her family and helping others.
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It seems a bit shit that I would talk about myself in such a high regard there, like there was any meaning to my birth. I mean, there was and there is. It’s still going. But holy cow, this almost seems inappropriate, but I had only recently admitted how little I meant to my closest surviving family. My eyes had gotten bonkers wide. And I wasn’t freaking out, not really. But the importance of everything really couldn’t be forgotten or ignored by myself. I would not and could not let that happen. For better or for worse. Yep, that’s life changing. Oh jeez.
After the memorial, in June of 2020, the 25th maybe, is when we had the funerals for Mary Lou and Leon, my Grandparents. June of 2020. The coronavirus pandemic was going strong and people were caring as much as they could. My aunt decided to evict me from my home before laying to rest her parents' remains. This very much doesn’t sit right with me, because I really don’t want to take my Grandparents ashes with me as their daughter sells their house. That just seems all sorts of weird backwards and wrong. Like, life isn’t supposed to happen that way, but because it has in the past that means it’s fine to keep happening. That’s like the same as excusing or ignoring shitty behavior because of more shitty behavior. Maybe not the best comparison.
My aunt also made a horrendous judgment call and brought an immunocompromised person out into the pandemic so she can go to a funeral for people she didn’t know. That’s God’s honest truth right there. Things do not end well for this immunocompromised girl and we will get there.
We end up having a small gathering at the cemetery to do the interment for their ashes. My aunt allows me to be the officiant for the services because I’m an ordained minister with the Universal Life Church. I’ll get into that later too. My aunt also isn’t religious or spiritual in the slightest bit, but she will pretend but then even more secretly she actually does have beliefs, she just hasn’t sorted them out to be non-contradictory and beneficial.
Considering everything, the funerals were nice. I invited a friend and her mother whose brother/son passed away unexpectedly a couple years before. And I had some pretty decent words written out to share. It would have been nice to have spoken directly from the heart at the time, but I’m sure I would have brought up the recent actions by their daughter and that would have been a very inappropriate thing for me to do. Without further ado, here is what I wrote and said at the funeral services for my Grandparents….
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Their qualities are coming back in style. Unconditional love. Caring. Empathy. Compassion. Critical thinking. A desire to learn new things.
June 1st was their 72nd anniversary. Their first one together in the next life. I wonder what that was like.
Leon didn’t like long hair on men. It made them look like girls. We all understand now that another person’s physical appearance is the least of our concerns. And if another person’s physical appearance is a big concern for you, then you have led a truly blessed life. (or maybe something traumatic)
Mary Lou and Leon experienced a thing not many people get to. A thing people say no one should experience. Yet, people have and still do. And they experienced it twice. The loss of a child. Mary Lou and Leon lost two of their’s.
Everything changes and everyone experiences change. And we look at that however we choose to. Growth, loss, regression, mutation, adaptation, acceleration, awakening.
We can look at every negative and turn it into a positive and we don’t have to lie to ourselves in order to do it.
On one hand the world can be in total harmony with every single person trying their absolute best and staying to theirself and accomplishing their life’s mission, only for it to be interrupted by some other force or element or agent of chaos.
And that’s the other hand. Maybe it’s all just chaos. Maybe there was an explosion and chaos ensued and everything and everyone just bumps into each other and there’s no rhyme or reason for it. We were just projected or expelled with force into an uncaring world.
And maybe it’s both. Maybe there’s order in the chaos. Maybe the chaos is becoming ordered. Who really knows? We’re all just here, enjoying ourselves and trying to make sense of this thing called life.
[THIS WAS WRITTEN BUT NOT READ] Is there something more? Well, there has to be. Because as humans we do not even know what nothing is. We made a word. And it means empty. Not here. Not there. Gone. Absent. Here, on Earth, in our bodies, we always have something. We don’t have a clue what nothing is when we talk about it. And death is not the end. [BACK TO WRITTEN AND READ]
I’m going to share a Hawaiian prayer or mantra that is very easy to remember. The intention of these words are “to put right; to put in order or shape, correct, revise, adjust, amend, regulate, arrange, rectify, tidy up, make orderly or neat.”
I LOVE YOU
I’M SORRY
PLEASE FORGIVE ME
THANK YOU
*****
And there you have it folks. I did my best and I know for a fact that at the time it fell on at least one pair of ears that were forced to be deaf.