While I have learned many valuable lessons from many extraordinary people, I am blessed to have those from my mother. She passed away not too long ago, but please don’t stop reading thinking this will be maudlin. Instead, lets focus on a life worth celebrating and lessons worth sharing.

Eleanor Roosevelt once said "The purpose of life is to live it, to taste experience to the utmost, to reach out eagerly and without fear for newer and richer experience." This captured my mother’s philosophy – reinventing herself, reaching out eagerly for newer, richer experiences, and teaching all of us to do the same. And being the mother of reinvention and new experiences, she lived four lifetimes in one.

Her first life started with a childhood that was a hard one. She would not speak of it, but that she had the courage to leave it, reinvent herself and start again made her a hero to us.

In her second life, she became a bookkeeper and worked for the government at a time when most women did not work. The employment needs generated from World War Two gave her the opportunity to significantly change her future by creating a paycheck and opening her to a larger world her earlier farm life had not.

That marriage was her third reinvention. She met my father and a romance started that lasted over half a century. They were always holding hands, even when my mother took her last breath. What a wonderful example of what a marriage should be. And for us kids, she sang in the kitchen whether making us wonderful meals – she was quite a cook – or popping Jiffy Pop. She was there for band-aiding knees and pulling out bee-stings. She stood by us through an assortment of teenage blunders and victories. She cheered us on when we did something well and caught us when we fell. A friend once said that the 3 words that most struck terror in his heart as a child was: “I’m telling Mom!” But that wasn’t the case in our house. She was kinder than we probably deserved, and definitely more patient. Friends of ours spoke of how she was like an extra mother, always gentle and kind, with her soft southern accent and her acceptance of everyone at the door.