Patricia Jennings-Welch: a great lady, a great legacy

By Daniel Patrick Welch

12 April 2009

Redress Information & Analysis contributor Daniel Patrick Welch pays tribute to his departed mother: “All that I learned about respect and dignity, about striving and not letting people be put down, it all came from this amazingly complicated, strong and astoundingly determined woman...”

Patricia Jennings-Welch. Wow. Ain't She a Woman! When I first memorized lines from the famous speech of Sojourner Truth, all I could think of was my mom.

That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles, or gives me any best place! And ain't I a woman? Look at me! Look at my arm! I have ploughed and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And ain't I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man – when I could get it – and bear the lash as well! And ain't I a woman? I have borne 13 children, and seen most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother's grief, none but Jesus heard me! And ain't I a woman?

All that I learned about respect and dignity, about striving and not letting people be put down, it all came from this amazingly complicated, strong and astoundingly determined woman to whom we bid farewell today. This woman who taught me to respect strength and compassion with equal weight – the woman, in short, who taught me how to be a man. This woman who taught so many so much, and from whose example I learned that nothing is beneath us – that unclogging toilets goes hand in hand with learning and teaching reading or a foreign language, that a life without striving is a life without value – but also that striving for oneself without raising others up is as pointless as it is morally reprehensible.

Patricia Jennings-Welch

I was incredibly blessed to have such a truly special relationship with this woman: my mother, my friend, my confidant, my mentor. But she touched so many lives, and so vigorously enjoyed the life she spent with all her children, from the retreats and trips to San Antonio and Austin to every last swim meet, mass, ball game, birthday party and celebration she could get to, however she could get there, for absolutely as long as she could stay. And far beyond her own immediate family, people always felt like they owned a piece of her. She may have been all that to me, but Mima was state property in a sense. One of so many wishes we received pointed out this quality – in addition to her tremendous intellect, her voracity and thirst for knowledge, and her incredible teaching capacity. The one quality shared first by my friend Volker from Germany was that she made everyone feel like she was their mother too:

She was the greatest mom you could ever have. As you know, I loved being treated by her as if I was yet another one of her children just because of this: everybody would have wanted this woman – as a mother, as a school founder – as a Mensch. Although it is very sad that she's gone now, she will be more living  even now than many people actually alive – in our memory.

This is why we left the blanket of flowers blank: they represent all of the seeds she planted, all of the flowers that sprouted, all of the people whose lives and dreams were jump started, pushed, prodded, brought to fruition, saved or just made a little richer by having known this woman.

Along these lines I would be remiss not to mention my wife Julia, who is now my partner in the depths of my grief just as she has been in everything else. She was at my side for years, helping me to care for my mom, who as many of you know had been in ill health for years. From helping my mom to bathe and change on our own wedding day, to the very last few moments of this great woman's life, Julia's love and support, for me, for my mom, for the dreams we all shared – we three Dragons of the Chinese Zodiac, or the PD&J team, as she said on her deathbed, the mutual love we all felt for each other was tangible and indispensable.

And although at times she may have been demanding, we must remember now that it was out of all this love that she always demanded the best. One stanza from the song we sang earlier is particularly poignant:

I was born down in the valley
where the sun refused to shine
But I'm climbing up to the highland
Gonna make that mountain mine!

And of course, she made this demand of everybody – whether you knew it or not. It is the best possible quality in a teacher ... and maybe in a mother as well. And she was sometimes paradoxically hardest on people when they said they couldn’t – and especially those to whom others had said they couldn't. You see, the enigma that was Pat Welch, always shooting for the moon (because sometimes you hit it) had an intensely pragmatic side as well: it wasn’t that self-pity was immoral – it just got in the way too much. How many times in the past week have people come up to us with stories, like the mother who told me and Julia: "When I came to bring my son to school, I told your mom, 'But I have no way to pick him up,' she said, 'Just get him to school; we'll figure out how to make it work.'" Gonna make that mountain mine! But again, never without raising up those around you as well.

One of my cousins wrote that “we all got a lot of inspiration from Aunt Pat. She had an amazing sense of optimism and there was nothing that was too difficult that couldn't be done once she put her mind to it. And I think she was able to convince a lot of people that they could do things that they might have otherwise not tried.”

In fact, this reputation for working her will against just about any impediment led to an interesting confusion in the wake of her passing. I had inadvertently written a wrong date when sending out a draft of the obituary. I sent a correction simply under the heading "typo". Her cousin immediately wrote to me to say that she was hoping it was all a typo. "Patsy declared it was all just a typo and she wasn’t going anywhere!"

A couple weeks before she died she turned to me and said: "Honey, I want you to put me into a coma. Then they can wake me up in five or 10 years when they've found a cure for everything that’s wrong with me." Another friend asked if, since she was going to the store, she could pick up anything for her. "Not unless you can pick up a set of lungs," she grinned, with that sparkle in her blue eyes that made us all think she must be joking ... she is joking...isn't she? You never really did know.

She had a favourite poem of her dad's, my grandfather, that he had written for her. We recited it together in her last few weeks, and it seemed to give her comfort.

Patsy
Today my child you're dressed in white
To symbolize the soul of God
To march with him toward all that's right
Along the path that Christ hath trod

Your thoughts are pure, your step is strong,
Your dreams are filled with pleasant hope
To lend you power to march along
Life’s road and with its burdens cope

A soldier true in God's own fold,
Your battle now is one with life
And may you be in heaven enrolled
When you have marched beyond Earth's strife.

He had written another poem, undoubtedly thinking of himself and his mother. I thought of it often lately, in relation to me and my own mother. When we went out for one of our last rides, and she insisted that she see everything new: the Y, the rebuilt Danversport, and finally the gravesite, I think in hindsight she was trying to tell us she knew.

Faith
A cynic may scorn as she kneels with her cross
And fingers the beads she may hold
But she has grown weary of life's goading ways
And she only knows she is old

She is weary of life and is fearful of death
And these beads that she holds are her hope
That there's something beyond life's last fleeting breath
That's unseen and unknown to our scope

And the cynic may scorn as she kisses that cross
And kneels with her head bowed low
She's at peace with her god, while he's at a loss
And weary for things he can't know.

Y ahora quiero decir algo, aunque brevemente, a la communidad hispana, la que tenia tanto amor para mi mama—diciendole simplemente siempre ‘la Dona.’ Y todos supieron de quien estabamos hablando, sin tener que decir nada mas. Tan como a muchos otros, la Dona ayudo bastante la gente de esta comunidad, con que tenia una connection especial. Me llamo una colega anterior desde Santo Domingo para darnos nuestras condolencias, explicando cuanto ayudo esta mujer, la dona, una mujer de tanta fuerza, intelegencia y amor, y tambien cuanto ayudo a sus hijos y a su familia—diciendo como tantos otros que sentia de Corazon que la dona fue, en cualquier parte, tambien su mama a ella. Me recordo tambien, pero no es que necesitaba que me recuerden, de la broma que yo siempre hicia con mi mama, relajando su pronunciacion en espanol. Zan-a-jor-i-a. Me reganaron, por supuesto, por relajar a una mujer con tanta dignidad, y sobre todo que trataba con todo su fuerze a conquistar el idioma espanol. Otra Montana que queria subir. Pero ojala, y supongo que saben todos, como entendio la Dona, que eso fue todo de amor.

I apologize to Father Sherridan and to those here for my going on perhaps a bit too long. I guess it's just a part of wanting to talk forever about this special lady, like the other part of the song we sang: undertaker please drive slow. But of course, when it's time, it's time, and we are not in control of the clock or the calendar. Forgive me. And now, for this great lady who always wanted to be the last to leave the party, it's time to let her rest. She fought, against fate, against disease, against time itself to the very end. I leaned and whispered in her ear as she lay on her deathbed, though I'm not sure if she could still hear me, that it was okay, that she could rest now and not be so tired. There were two dates in the last several weeks that help explain this final contradiction. The 20th of January was the date of her last appointment with her oncologist, and it was in some ways from that time that we felt her start to slip away. And that night, as Julia and I slept on a mattress on the floor of her bedroom, keeping her company as she lay grappling with the grimmest of news, I worried to Julia, "She’s not eating." "She’s not reading," Julia responded. "For Pat Welch, that’s an even worse sign."

But I remember now that 20 January was also inauguration day, a day she had waited for for eight long years. I distinctly remember her crying in 2004; when I asked her why she took it so hard, she replied, "but now I might not live to see Bush gone!" So maybe 20 January was important to her in more ways than we think. The other odd date story I just discovered yesterday. We went to CVS, where we went so many many times to pick up the prescriptions that helped keep her alive, and I couldn’t park without crying. I pulled into a disabled space and pulled out my mom’s placard as a sort of reflex.

When I realized what I was doing I smiled, figuring that she and the law wouldn’t dare begrudge me this one last transgression. But as I looked at the placard hanging from the rear view, I noticed the expiration date: 24 February 2009 – the very night we had rushed her into Brigham, and the last trip she had taken in our dumpy little car. In shock, I sat back and reflected. It is time, finally, to let this poor woman rest, this woman who never took a break from anything. Rest, Ma, rest. We love you, and you will always, always be alive with us. "May the road rise to greet you, may the wind be always at your back, may the sun shine warm upon your face, the rain fall soft upon your fields – and until we meet again, may God hold you in the palm of his hand." I love you, Ma. Goodbye.