Text of remarks made at Holy Family Catholic Church, Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, at the conclusion of January 27, 2014 funeral
Mass for Kathleen (McCabe) Schuessler Pedi -
who was born February 14, 1926, and born to eternal life January 24, 2014
I would like to
thank two people, my sister Julie who took care of Kathleen in 1979 after our father died. You set aside your own life to
care for your mother when she needed help.
Thank you so much. And I thank my sister, Jeanne, for taking the
lead in caring for Kathleen the last five years when she was at Hillside Manor
Nursing Home, as she declined with her Parkinson’s condition. We are so grateful.
 |
| Kathleen, ten years ago |
May I please take
you back to a time, more than 50, almost
60 years ago when my mother, Kathleen, was having her children. And she had eight of us. She always said, "I have five beautiful daughters, and three fine sons." But here I would like to go back to those first years, and then to what I'll call the St.
Joseph School
St.
Theresa of Avila said this:
Christ
has no body but yours,
No hands, no feet on earth but yours,
Yours are the eyes with which he looks
Yours are the feet with which he walks to do good,
Yours are the hands, with which he blesses …
Yours are the hands, yours are the feet ....
Yours are the eyes with which he looks
Yours are the feet with which he walks to do good,
Yours are the hands, with which he blesses …
Yours are the hands, yours are the feet ....
Today I say to you that hers was
the body. Hers were the hands. Hers were the feet. And hers were the eyes, those beautiful Irish eyes. Yes, she
danced with her feet, and played violin with her hands. But for us
it was much more. When we were so little that we didn’t
know anything about Jesus, Kathleen was like Mother Theresa to us.
Kathleen was the only Jesus that we had. Here are two examples:
When Christine was two she almost died from pneumonia. Christine was so sick that she got very tiny. That's how Kathleen gave her the nickname, "the wee one." But Kathleen nursed her back to health.
The earliest memory of my entire life came from ourMarr
Street house in Fond du Lac .
You won’t believe this, but I remember
from my crib, when I was no more than two years old, waking up to this baby Mary crying, and who would not stop crying. We have all heard of those weeks and months
when Mary would not stop crying. And picture this for Kathleen. She is a young mother of about 30, with this
crying baby, and with a two year old and a three year old, and she is pregnant
with Christine. Many moms would lose
their cool facing this, would be overwhelmed.
But Kathleen did not lose her cool.
She loved that baby Mary, and she held her in her arms night after night, to where she finally stopped crying. Kathleen did not
just survive those years of young motherhood.
She thrived on those challenges.
She loved that time of her life.
The earliest memory of my entire life came from our
It’s
freezing cold today, 8 below zero outside. To my memory, the weather was always like it is today in January when we were small – below zero. But if this were 1965 we would have been playing
tackle pom pom on the St. Joseph school
playground today. Yes, our teachers (Sisters of St. Agnes) let us
play. They would let the snow stay on parts
of the concrete schoolyard, and we stormed out there at recess and got it packed down from playing those running and tackling games on it. We also played king of the hill on the snow
piles created by the plowed snow. What
does this have to do with Kathleen? She
had to get all the gear for us – the coats, those face mask ski hats, the
mittens and gloves, and help us load it all on every day, so that we could get
out and walk to school two blocks away, and be prepared to handle those wonderful school
recess periods out in the cold. There
were 700 of us baby boomers crammed into St. Joseph
School
Kathleen
rarely raised her voice. We lived in a giant old house 136
Sheboygan Street and the eight of us would be spread out all over
it, in different spots. (Thanks to my brother Jim, who made arrangements with the owner, we are going to go through that house later today.) Christine was
usually in the study “den” with her two
imaginary friends, named Cottie and Cootie.
But when mom called for you,
she wouldn’t shout for you. She would quietly go to you and ask you to
take out the garbage or clean the kitchen.
There was no yelling. Even
when John and I were playing catch in the dining room and broke the Jesus statue she didn’t yell. She just cried, and then she forgave us.
When
we had some trouble in our house, at
about age eight I could sense it and was bothered by it. In the middle of this I remember asking Kathleen, “Mom, what was the best time of your
life?” She said, “Right now is pretty
good.” About two years later, again some
things were going wrong, and I went to Kathleen again and said, “Mom, tell me, what was
the best time of your life?” She said,
“I would say right now is good.” Fr. Tom talked about that in his tremendous homily. Thinking of that raises this question: Was
Kathleen Pollyanna? No, she was not Pollyanna. She was gifted
with the ability to endure suffering with composure.
As
everyone has been saying over the last couple of weeks, nursing home staff
included, Kathleen was all about
sacrificial love, the eyes, hands and
feet of love which St. Theresa described.
My sister Julie said, “She lived a
quiet kind of love. “
On that subject of
what love means, I will close with this, which was Kathleen’s personal teaching to me. We were at Schreiners Restaurant, Kathleen
and I, and Jeanne and Christine were
there with us. It was May, 1980, just a couple of days before I would be getting married. My sisters were looking
straight at me, to make sure that I was listening to what Kathleen was going to
say to me about how I needed to treat my beautiful new bride, Katy. Kathleen’s words were simple. She said to me, “Tom, be kind, be kind.”
Tom
Schuessler
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