A Few Words from Jane and Jane’s Mother …

A Few Words from Jane and Jane’s Mother …
Daisy Louise Schlichtemier
March 31, 1926 – July 9, 2018

You’ve heard the phrase, or a variation, “fierce like a mother lioness”.  My siblings’ and my Mother was like that. She cared about protecting children, most especially her own:

“I apologize for being so crude. I just lose it occasionally – especially if someone has been mean to my kid”, she wrote to me on a torn piece of notepad paper, an apology left in my car after some event I must have witnessed but cannot remember. Indeed, our Mother was a pistol.

She protected us from others but also from our (potentially) inflated egos. Her focus was humility. We weren’t to “get on our high horse” or “get above our raising” or “get too big for our britches”. Education, church, Girl Scouts, and Indian Guides were all-important.

I found this by her TV/writing and reading/sleeping chair – part of a short essay she wrote. To whom, we don’t know; maybe to all of us:

If you don’t know anything, you’re wide open to believing anything that anyone says to you-
and there are unscrupulous people-a-plenty out there… Learn all you can, absorb, but let it
be from legitimate sources-teachers, books, librarians.

Next to that same chair I found this poem complete with many editing marks and scrawled on the back of an envelope, so surely it is hers:

Life
My name is life.
I have a mainstream;
There, most strong people dwell.
There’s a barren where the weak stray,
Always…I beckon them.

Paraphrased here, Henry Van Dyke wrote years ago in an analogy of dying and a beautiful ship heading for the ocean:

… Then someone at my side says: “There, she is gone!”
“Gone where?”
Gone from my sight. That is all.
There are other eyes watching her coming,
and others voices ready to take up the glad shout: “Here she comes!”

A friend of mine has lately lost her dear son, and she told me she would bear it because she knew with certainty that she would see him again.

That is so comforting to me, also.

Gone from our sight. That is all.