Thursday....January 27th...2011

This is part 4 and the last of the Eulogy for Linda from the 4 children...

Sometime during her sophomore year at St. Olaf, Mom went back to Nebraska to attend her cousins wedding. My father, from across the room at the reception, took one look at her and knew that they would someday be married. That very next day she told him that he was crazy, within a few moths, she told him “I Do”

They soon got married and started their life together in Lincoln. She gave birth to her first child on her twenty-first birthday, (ME). She would tell everyone that she became an adult the hard way, but in fact was blessed with a perfect child.

Soon after, her husband Richard, or dad as I liked to call him, graduated from college and they moved out to Oregon because it was important for Mom to be near her family.
She gave birth to a second son and we moved to a nice quiet town called Monmouth where we started a family business and she used her skills from the FHA to settle in to be the best mom a boy could ever have.

I remember the first day of school like it was yesterday. I was so excited I was ready to go four hours before sunrise. I soon discovered school wasn’t that great because Mom couldn’t go with me. I would run home when school was over because I couldn’t wait to see her. I would often pretend that I was sick so I could stay home to hang out with my mom, just her and I.

Everyone loved her, especially my friends. They lived at our house practically the whole summer probably because there was never a shortage of cookies lying around. Just so you know we got 3 at lunch, 2 after school, and 3 for dessert. She was always there to read you a story or put a band-aid on a skinned knee after we fell off our skateboards.

She put so many on my friend Alex’s knee he bought her a brand new box for Xmas to replace the ones she had administered.

We were a close family and would spend all of our free time together whether it was sitting around the house or on vacation in our motor home. When that wasn’t happening we would spend our time at Grandma’s house or with close friends. There wasn’t anything more important to Mom than family and friends.

In the Spring of 77, she was blessed with a daughter. She was so convinced that it was a girl that the nursery was painted pink and Dad’s cigars said “It’s a Girl”. She was such an amazing mom that God decided she needed one more, so nineteen months later Jonathan was born. It was a good thing our house had six bedrooms.

Life was good and you would never know it if it wasn’t. She always had an amazing smile and enough love to share with everyone. There wasn’t a single person that met her that did not think she was incredible, imagine being able to call her mom.

A little over a year after Jono was born, we were hit with the loss of our father in a private plane accident. She was single, 33, with four small children, and as a twelve year old boy, I wasn’t worried. My mom could do anything. I knew she could take care of our family which she continued on doing right up until she took her last breath.