A year ago, I posted the eulogy I gave at my mother’s funeral.  Sunday, I will get my second chance to speak about her as her headstone is unveiled.  The custom is to celebrate the work her soul did on its trip through this life, so I had to think beyond what I originally wrote.  Here is what I’ll say.

My mother brought peace to the world, without ever winning a Nobel Prize for her work.  She just believed that people should get along and so she treated them that way.  She never held a grudge, at least not very firmly.  And she told me that while I didn’t have to be best friends with everyone, at least I had to give them a chance.

I remember her saying this about boys too, when I was dating them.  I remember thinking at that time, you can’t possibly mean this, Mom.  I mean, he might have been polite to you, but you didn’t see him gearing up for a teenage smooch-a-thon.  I always wondered if that would have changed her mind.

But it turns out that she was right.  What she was saying was, don’t make snap judgments on the basis of what you see.  It takes time to experience people, to value what is special about them, and to discover their flaws, fatal and otherwise.  And I realized that she, in her own way, knew the reason that Role-Based Assessment works.  Of course with RBA, you know the answers when you read their report.  As we say, it’s the ‘new way to know’.  But it’s based on something very old and as practical and enduring as a mother’s wisdom.

My uncle Phil passed away late Monday night and today was his funeral.  He was around 93 or 4 as far as I can calculate.  As we gathered at the cemetery, it was eerily reminiscent of a virtual team team coming together for some face time.  Some people see a lot of each other, some are only seen at the obligatory times of life transitions.  And some stay in the shadows and are never seen.  One is the subject of brief discussion.  No one’s heard from him in years and no one seems to miss his presence.  No, I think, it’s exactly like a team.  You don’t get to choose your relatives and, most of the time, you don’t get to choose your team.   You work with what you have, respect each for who they are, and try your best to do what needs to be done.

Phil went to work every day, selling fur coats in New York City, well past his 90th birthday.  After Jeanette, my aunt and his life partner of over 50 years, died, age caught up with him.  A leg infection finally stopped him from taking the subway from Forest Hills every day. It was at that point that I realized we had more in common than family.  We were hidebound entrepreneurs that had no intention of ever hanging up our boots.  But now he was resigned to moving in with his daughter and her husband.  They took him to work with them – they run a small clothing shop – but there isn’t room on a team for two who want to do the same thing.  Especially when one has no industry experience and flagging energy.

So I’d call him when I was on the street in Philadelphia, walking from home to office to appointments, whenever I had a few minutes. We talked about business – mostly his – since in both our minds he would soon return to it and market intelligence would be vital to his commercial success.    My inputs were limited, but appreciated – the first day it was cold enough for people to wear fur, what the Walnut Street furrier was showing in his window, what the fur protesters were saying.  It was a way of staying in the game – being on the team.

Today we celebrated his place on our family team, we of rapidly declining numbers.  Among the mourners was a young man I didn’t remember.  But I recognized his name: Phil’s employer of many years, Neustadter Furs.

A work team becomes family.  It can be difficult to tell where one starts and one leaves off.

My mother passed from this world last week at age 85, having suffered from Parkinson’s and dementia for too many years.  This was my eulogy, which I called Lessons From My Mother.

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When I think of who my mother was, I think of her as a woman much younger than I am now. I think of the time when I was on my late teens and she was around 40, when it was her mission to teach me everything she knew about being a good woman.

She was an excellent manager of money, as many who survived the Great Depression were, but she was never stingy, neither with her money nor her time, even when there wasn’t much of either. She could figure out how to spend the same dollar twice and how to make you feel there was all the time in the world, even when she had to get ready to go to work. She could turn what she had into what you needed, whether that was a bargain basement dress she made special by changing the buttons or the time she found – or made – to play Scrabble with me. Like most valuable lessons, that is something you teach by being an example and letting your protégée see how you do it, step by step.

Her second lesson was about accomplishing. That was her word. Whatever it was we set out to do, whether a trip to S. Klein’s On The Square to shop for my trousseau or spending the morning with a can of Johnson’s Glass Wax cleaning the windows of our apartment on Walton Avenue, when we were done, she would get a satisfied look on her face and say to me, “We accomplished.” I realize that was the beginning of my understanding that things that have meaning, the big and the small, are done by teams. It is an illusion that we are so powerful that we accomplish things in a vacuum by ourselves. It was not my strong point but interdependency – what we call teamwork – came naturally to her and she was my model for how I do it now.

Her third lesson was to respect everyone, no matter who they were or what they did. By this, she meant not to forget them, not to assume that they were taken care of. Again, the Great Depression was probably an influence on her, but she also had such a good example in her sister Jeanette, may she rest in peace.

So to honor her memory, I ask that you do three things today.

First, be pleased with what you have been granted and make it into what you need. Try spending it twice, whether it is in money that you use to create more value to the world or time that you not waste on trivial things.

Second, accomplish something with someone else. It doesn’t matter what it is, only that it’s something you’re both proud of.

Third, remember people you would not ordinarily think of and find a way to make their lives easier in some way.

And as you leave today, remember, as I will, that she was not a weeper and wailer, but rather a rememberer of good times. Even as her own memory failed her, she could speak of the past, always of family and friendships, of trips and adventures. Remember her at in the most wonderful times you had with her – the birthday parties of our childhood, the hot dogs at Coney Island, whenever it was that you were with her. And wish her well on her newest journey, the one we will all someday join her on.

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She was a Watchdog.  (If you are unfamiliar with the Roles, you can find out about them by listening to the webcasts on The Ten People You Really Want on Your Team!)  She enjoyed it and she was good at it, both at home and at work, where she was in senior management and patiently taught her reports how to do things right.

She taught me all the favorite tasks of the Watchdog – budgeting, accounting, repairing and making do with what you had – but I never really enjoyed doing them.  She didn’t understand why I did the things I loved – starting businesses, speaking, writing, networking.  She was just happy that she had done her job right and I could do something to make a living.  We respected, trusted and had faith in each other.  She is on my team, and in my heart, forever.