Love Led Her: A Tribute to My Mom

Love led her to be a wife who shared her husband’s vision
- To marry a skinny young lawyer from Boone, despite fears that kidney disease might leave her a young widow;
- to push past her utter terror and attend her first precinct meeting with that skinny young lawyer who wanted to make a difference;
- to be one of the first candidate’s wives to have her own campaign trail, speaking around NC to encourage voters to elect her long-shot husband as their next governor;

Love led her to Dream the Impossible Dream

Love led her to be an impeccable hostess
- To apply her home economics training to her role as First Lady at the ripe old age of 33;
- to oversee the renovation of the Governor’s Mansion,
- making and hanging draperies
- and redesigning architectural plans to help make the Mansion feel more like a home for future Governor’s families;

Love led her to be an incredible nurse
- To return to nursing school while still living in the Governor’s Mansion--- can’t you just IMAGINE the looks on the faces of the Highway Patrol when informed that her next nursing internship would be at Dorothea Dix?
- to learn how to provide dialysis in our home for Daddy in the years before his transplant 20 years ago;
- to pursue a masters degree in nursing so she could know more and help more;
- to lovingly nurse hospice patients and their families through the last days;
- to fight for patients and families as vigorously and as lovingly as she nursed them.

Love led her to bless our family and
- To love Daddy’s family as deeply as she loved her own;
- to host countless family gatherings;
- to host a New Year’s Eve wedding celebration of a lifetime
- to join with sisters, Nancy and Linda, in caring for their father and mother in the last years of their lives;
- to share her values, knowledge and family traditions with Holly & Maggie;
- to support John, Holly, Maggie and me as we answered God’s calling to serve in Mexico
- and to cheer her beloved Demon Deacons almost all the way to the Orange Bowl;

Love led her to care for and support other cancer patients and ailing friends and family while fighting her own battle with cancer

And love led her to apply what she knew about cancer to her own life --- to be her own last patient --- and to teach us how to care for her by sharing how she had cared for countless others.

It’s not that Mom did all these things easily, but that love led her to do them. Love led her to push through her reservations, to look past the immediate concerns, and to see the big picture. Some came as naturally as breathing…especially the nursing part. From the moment when she was 16 years old and saw a baby delivered, she knew that God was calling her to be a nurse. When life created detours, she managed to find a way to get back on track and to stay true to that calling. But other challenges revealed her courage, her toughness, and her determination. No matter where she was along that journey, she honored her God, her family and her beloved North Carolina with grace, dignity, intelligence and beauty.

While Mom could be just as comfortable taking care of a patient in a Scotland County trailer as hosting a State dinner, she had a kind of beauty that I can only equate with a diamond. It would be easy to get captivated with any one facet of her … beloved family member, hospice nurse, First Lady, long-shot candidate’s campaign partner, hostess, or teacher…. but to do so could allow us to miss the many other facets. Together those facets made up a beautiful, brilliant, extraordinary woman. We will miss her, but we know that her love led her and taught us all.

for Memorial Service, December 10, 2006