Janet – she taught me that there is no hit so hard from which I cannot get up.

I’m trapped in my head tonight. It literally won’t shut up. So I decided to post something about my mom. This is the eulogy I wrote and spoke at her memorial service. I still tear up when I read it. But she deserves to live on in whatever way I can make that happen. I really miss her tonight.

Janet (McBride) Keller – January 5th, 1943 – August 19th, 2019

As I am the last reader of the day, I apologize for covering some of the same topics as others who have read here, but these things bear repeating.

Janet Keller-McBride – My Mom & Resilience

This is going to be harder than I thought. I’ve said that a lot to myself in the last 3 weeks.

I would have hoped that at my mother’s memorial service the speaker closing the event would have been the most talented public speaker reading the product of the most adroit writer we knew of. But alas she is unavailable being also the honoree of the event. With that said I will try to utilize a few of the myriad things she taught me so that this may be at least passable in comparison. I think Janet’s only regret were she aware, would be that she was unable to attend a gathering of so many that she loved and that touched her life.

            In the past few weeks I’ve had substantial time to contemplate things. In the fickle way we perceive time it felt as though each day was more than 24 hours in length as we sat around and watched mom in hospice, yet in retrospect the last 3 weeks seems to have passed in about 10 minutes. During that time, I read an unattributed quote, “at some point in your childhood you and your friends went outside to play together for the last time, and nobody knew it.” As odd as it seems at our ages, we all grew up a lot this week. More so, it reminded me how sophomoric we’ve become. Each event like this we go through reminds us that we’re not as wise or as advanced as we thought we were. And today I miss my mom.

            But that’s not what I came up here to talk about. Anyone that met Janet in any capacity will feel sorrow at her passing. With the exception of, Charter cable and the Permits section of City Hall, I can’t recall anyone with whom mom had any lasting feuds. She was always one to keep things lighthearted and funny. Funny was the most important. Her humor could be cutting or it could be uplifting. But mom could find the joke in any situation. She once pulled up to the Keller & Associates office on 2^nd street having damaged the car in a parking garage. Laura was standing outside and asked her why the bumper was in the back seat. Mom replied “because it wouldn’t fit in the fucking trunk.” A notoriously bad driver – especially when it came to parking near immobile objects – this was the third in a three-week stint of expensive body damage to the 1988 Honda Accord. She couldn’t help but laugh when she drove (with my then inconsolable father) to Neibling Auto Body only to discover they had changed the marquis lettering in front to read “welcome back valued customer Janet Keller.” No matter the reason, she loved a good joke.

 And boy she could write. Reading her old ½ A Bubble Off columns over the last two weeks I’d forgotten just how good of a writer and how funny she was. As I typed and read this aloud, I kept thinking to myself, “Keller, don’t go over on your time and make sure you read this thing clearly.” There was a smile on my face as I recalled getting in trouble once as a kid when I found and absconded with my mom’s stopwatch for some game I was playing. No ordinary stopwatch, this thing was huge, chrome, and shaped like a pocket watch. She was angry because this was the crucial tool she used when she practiced reading radio spots she’d written for some of many St. Louis names. She would write about an upcoming show at the Repertory Theater, seasonal happenings at the Missouri Tourism Commission, events at Laclede’s Landing, and this list goes on far beyond what I have allotted time to cover today. I would hear her practicing the correct diction for the piece so she could then convey and teach it to whomever she was working with that day.

            I learned something else during these past few weeks. After 40 years, I met Janet Keller-McBride. I had always known my mom, but that was not all of her, that was just a fraction and a small one at that. Some people say that parenthood is a new chapter of our lives. In Janet’s it was more like sequel and I was in the third or fourth. She had done more by the time I came along than people could do in two lives. Before she went to college, she was a champion in debate (which anyone that has ever argued with her will completely agree), an actress, she knew how to hunt and fish, she could write stories, she could paint, she was an accomplished pencil artist, she could play the accordion, she could play the piano, and she should sing. In college she added set design and costuming to the mix. Following her time at SMSU she added singing jazz in Gaslight Square and then she became a mother for the first time. She worked for the department of mental health as a social worker. She returned to and finished her bachelor’s degree…with two kids in her now full-time care. She started not one but two successful businesses in Bright Ideas and later Keller & Associates. She wrote for local publications. And she tirelessly promoted Saint Louis and the Shaw Neighborhood where she finally found what she would call home.

            I knew some of these things. But I was affected by all of them. As I sat there contemplating, I imagined the resilience of a young woman at 22 moving from a small farming town to a new city where she knew virtually no one and started literally from scratch. I later thought of the 31-year-old single mother working 2 jobs and finishing her degree while raising two incredible, and incredibly energetic kids. I thought of the woman opening a business in a 400 square foot office space on 39^th street with a Leading-Edge computer, a secondhand metal shipping clerks desk, a stopwatch, and small client list. She managed to hold all these things together (plus raise me) when she faced the death of her 23-year-old son and both parents within 29 months.

            Janet taught me resilience. I opened my first business when I was in my mid 20’s. I returned to college when I was 36. And I remember the smile on my mom’s face when I handed her the picture of me receiving my degree. By then she was too sick to attend the ceremony. I saw this same smile every time one of us kids or the grandkids accomplished something great. The smile grew even bigger when we accomplished something against the odds. For the longest time I thought my accomplishments in difficult situations were my own. In recent weeks I discovered these were the result of a resilience I inherited, that I was taught, and that I have come to rely on. Janet taught me that there is no hit so hard from which I cannot get up.

            In closing I want to remember the most important echoes. The sound of her voice echoing torch songs and ballads though the old Cleveland house as she tapped the keys on the grand Schuman piano. The sound of her voice in perfect diction as she read 200 words in 60 seconds that would later bring a crowd to some event or place. The stories she told of smoky jazz clubs, hot summer shows in a tent theater, and the McBrides sitting in the living room of the family house in Lebanon, MO telling tales of family exploits spanning a hundred years. And the sound of her infectious laugh that our neighbors on Cleveland heard on a daily basis.

Most importantly I want to remember her sense of humor. How in the most morose of circumstances she could find something ironic to make light of. How she could laugh at herself. How she could come up with something off the top of her head to light up a room. I think it is this I will think of and miss the most. So today I leave you with this quote by Groucho Marx; “The secret of life is honesty and fair dealing. If you can fake that, you’ve got it made.”