My brother contacted me last Monday to let me know that the hospice workers who were managing my mother’s care had told him he should make sure to visit her the following day. And as anyone who’s ever dealt with hospice knows, when they tell you you’d better visit, you’d better visit.

Which was an easier thing for my brother than for me, as he lives just 20 miles away, while I’m more than 1,000. And with Christmas Day behind me and New Year’s Eve ahead of me, it looked at first as if that distance was going to prevent me from having the chance to say goodbye to my Mom. Every flight which could have gotten me there over the next 48 hours seemed sold out.

Luckily, the severity of my situation, as well as the persuasiveness of my tears, worked wonders on Southwest Airlines (thank you, Leah!), and my wife and I were able to make it to Florida late Tuesday night … although, because even miracles can only be so big, we ended up on different flights. We headed to Mom straight from Fort Lauderdale airport, arriving by her side slightly before 1:00 a.m. Wednesday.

She passed at 4:53 a.m. that morning.

But before she did, I was able to tell her I was there, and thank her for the gifts she had given me. She was not conscious to hear what I had to say, though the hospice worker who was present would claim, whenever Mom raised an eyebrow, that she’d heard me. I’d like to believe that, but find it hard to bring myself to do so.

What I can accept, though, is that any change in expression meant she was dreaming of being back with my father, to whom she was married for 55 years and three days, and to whom she ached to return during every moment since he left us.

Mom’s funeral was scheduled for the following afternoon—these things happen quickly in the Jewish faith—and there was much that needed to be done before then, including alerting all the friends and family for whom my brother and I had contact information. To anyone we missed: Please forgive us.

The service and interment took place the next day at Star of David Memorial Gardens Cemetery, the same place where my mother’s parents and my father were put to rest. I felt their presence as we did what we were called upon to do.

And one of those things was the most difficult thing I’ve had to do since my father died seven years ago this month—stand up in public and speak about a dead parent without sobs obscuring the words I hoped to share.

This is what I said about my mother, Toni Edelman, who can be seen above beside her brother holding a quite befuddled and much younger me.

Fourteen days from today, on January 14, I was supposed to be with my mother celebrating her 80th birthday. Instead, I am here with you and her, celebrating her life.

There is a part of me that counts the 15 days she fell short of that date and grows angry. Because I am human, and like all of us, I love those round numbers, arbitrary numbers.

But I’m trying to fight that impulse, to instead think of the miracle of the extra days she had, days I didn’t really expect to have with her. Some of you may know this, and some not, but Mom was only 40, half her lifetime ago, when she was diagnosed with the emphysema that eventually took her.

I count it as a miracle that—through determination, through great force of will, though the knowledge there was work to be done, through her love for her family, her beloved Barney—she had as many years of life after her diagnosis as she had before. That she was able to come this far and do so much.

That she could get a Masters in Social Work from Columbia University and work all her life to help others.

And have a marriage that set the bar so high for love it was a challenge to others for 55 years and three days, until my father was taken from her.

And see her two sons and three grandchildren raised, all of whom made her proud, and all of whom she made sure knew it.

My mother gave me so many gifts during our lives together that it would be impossible to list them all.

She and my father built a home filled with love, and in that home gave me all the things I needed to make me who I am today.

In my earliest memories, she taught me the difference between right and wrong. She taught me not to judge people by their religion or the color of her skin, but by who they were inside. She taught me the importance of love. She taught me all the things that mattered.

And she taught me how to read.

There was a lot of reading in my childhood, both her reading to me and me reading to her. And not just Dr. Seuss either, though I’m sure we must have gone through One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish so many times anyone who didn’t love me as much as she did would have surely gone mad.

But there was also Shakespeare. And The Prophet. And The Little Prince. And The Rubiyat of Omar Khayam. And in doing that gave me such a love of words I could not have become anything but a writer.

But the gift she gave me that was the most amazing, the gift for which I am the most grateful, is the gift she was not given, and which was also a gift she could not give herself. And yet, somehow, in a way I can hardly believe possible, she was able to give it to me.

My mother, though she was no optimist, somehow managed to make me an optimist.

Though she saw the universe as dangerous, she allowed me to feel as if the the universe loved me, and good things will happen if only I leave myself open to them.

She loved me so deeply, and sheltered me so well, and protected me with such strength, with a fierceness that knew no equal, that she gave me an attitude, a belief system, which allows me to walk through this world happy.

I would have gladly sacrificed that if only I could have given that gift back to her.

For all the decades my mother has been telling my brother and me that we’d better write her good eulogies, you’d think I’d have had one finished long before now. And one that’s much better than the one I’m delivering.

I guess she hoped—even though she never specifically said it—that we’d finish them when she was still around for us to read them to her so she could know exactly how much she was loved. And she did know, though with different words. But a parent’s eulogy is the kind of thing you foolishly hope you’ll never have to give, and so you put it off and put it off as long as you can, until it becomes absolutely necessary.

It’s just as well I put these words together in a day rather than over 30 years. Because 30 years wouldn’t have been enough for me to explain to you the how and the why of it in a way that could possibly be enough anyway.

So I will end my eulogy with her eulogy. Words, which, though not hers, are ones she told me she wanted you to hear.

A poem by Mary Elizabeth Frye—

Do not stand at my grave and weep.
I am not there; I do not sleep.
I am a thousand winds that blow.
I am the diamond glints on snow.
I am the sunlight on ripened grain.
I am the gentle autumn rain.
When you awaken in the morning’s hush
I am the swift uplifting rush
Of quiet birds in circled flight.
I am the soft stars that shine at night.
Do not stand at my grave and cry;
I am not there; I did not die.

I love you, Mom.

When I was done, I collapsed in the front row of the chapel between my wife and son, and it was my brother’s turn to try to hold it together, followed by grandkids plus a woman who’d been friends with Mom for nearly half a century. And then it was time to put Mom beside Dad, which is all she ever really wanted.

For the next few days, friends and family visited, and for a few days after that, my brother and I sorted through a lifetime of family photos and documents, deciding who would best cherish each.

And now I’m home, with certain trip rituals unfulfilled.

Last night, for example, I couldn’t call my mother from the Fort Lauderdale airport to let her know I’d gotten there in time to make my flight. Nor could I call from Baltimore to let her know the plane had touched down safely.

The days and weeks and months to come will be filled with many such moments—no 80th birthday card to mail this week, no cake to be bought, no candles readied for her to blow them out—and I must prepare myself for the pain of such moments.

It is only because of the gifts she gave me that I’ll be up to it.

(Above: The last photo I ever took with Mom, March 12, 2014.)