It's been a year since my mother passed away. I wrote her eulogy, and I'd like to share it with you so she is remembered. Thanks for reading.
Everything is a story. Our minds make sense of the world in series of beginnings, middles, and ends. You can't explain or inform, or even remember without telling a story. In a very real way, the fabric of our experience is woven in story. It's the only reality we can know.
I think my mom knew this in a way I didn't entirely appreciate. She knew that if all of life is story, then of course, all the world's a stage. And she intended to bring as much drama to her part as she could. It was as though with every fiber of her being, she faced the world and declared, "You will remember me." If you met her, you know she was unforgettable. I've heard her called fiesty, fiery, a fighter, a spitfire, a huge pain in the ass. No one ever called her dull.
She always loved—and reminded me of—this passage from Whitman's "Song of Myself:"
I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable,
I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.
And what a yawp Mom had.
The Vietnam memoirist Tim O'Brien writes that every story has two truths: the factual truth—the who, what, when, and where of it all—and the story truth—the part that matters, independent of facts. Story truth is the soul of a story, the part that sticks with you; the part that, when it's told right, can make you shiver, because it cuts right through you. Story truth can change your life. It's a power my mother taught me to both respect and love deeply. I think she did that for some of you as well.
So here we are at the end of a story. And it was a damned good one—complicated, nuanced, joyous, and heartbreaking.
It wouldn't do my mother justice to only remember the happy chapters. Her truth is about more than that. The complexity is, in many ways, the point. So I want to say this at the beginning: my mother was haunted—by addiction, and by mental health issues that worsened her addictions. These diseases shortened her life, and had an impact on those around her.
We can glean from her lifelong battle: lessons about seeking help, about destigmatizing struggles with mental health and addiction. And lessons about compassion for those amidst these struggles, even when their impacts are so, so painful.
These are important lessons, but they are far from the totality of Carol Ann Taggart. They are but a shadow of her true self, glimpsed through a glass darkly. So enough about her demons. It was her better angels that made her a certain kind of wonderful, and that speak to her story truth.
Mom lived two or three full lives before I was even in the picture. Some of you knew her then, but I regret that I can only tell you with any detail about my mother in the time that I knew her. Her adventures would fill more time than we have here, but I hope they continue to be remembered and shared.
Okay, I will share one: while she was living in Derry in Northern Ireland during The Troubles (for reasons that are a whole other story entirely), she went out one day to run some errands, only to return to find her flat ablaze, collateral damage from a car bomb she only just missed. She always did have the luck of the Irish.
A few years ago, I had the privilege to visit Derry myself. While mom wasn't with me, we texted constantly as I walked the ancient walls of Derry, and the streets she used to frequent. I showed her the new murals, and the old. She marveled at how much progress had been made. She had hoped one day to see the city without barricades or factional violence, but it was difficult then to see the path to peace.
I tell you that story because it hints at what I've come to understand as Mom's core truth: she didn't just love people, although if you were ever in a room with her, you know she did. She believed in people—believed in humanity, really—and our capacity to grow, to be better.
Here's something I'm not sure everyone knew about Mom: she loved sports. If the Eagles were playing, they were on in our house. And some of our longest conversations were about how the Phillies were doing. God, I wish she could see how this season plays out. But it wasn't just Philly sports. Summers were for Wimbledon and the Tour de France, both of which she followed religiously. And when the Olympics happened? Our whole life revolved around the Games, from opening to closing. In summer, it was gymnastics. In winter, figure skating. She lived and died with every flip, every vault, and every axel. When they stuck the landing, she cheered. When they fell, she fell with them. Couldn't figure out why for the longest time—or why I felt the same way.
But another joy we shared unlocked the answer.
Mom and I both cried at the same thing. I mean, she cried at everything. But we were both moved to tears by something that might seem silly: spacecraft launches. One of my earliest memories is of watching—well, really feeling—the thunderous launch of the space shuttle Atlantis over Cape Canaveral. Every launch, every landing was appointment viewing in our house. I grew up loving aviation and spaceflight, but it took me ages to figure out why Mom did.
It's the audacity of it. Humans riding a barely-controlled explosion to slip the surly bonds of earth. And for what? At its best, spaceflight exists for that most human of reasons: discovery. We go because we haven't yet. We go because it's another path out of the cave.
Just so with sports—especially the Olympics, where people strive for the best versions of themselves, to reach beyond what is thought possible. In sports, Mom saw the beauty of human struggle. And I learned to see it too.
Always growing, always learning. That's the humanity my mom loved and believed in.
I knew my mother best as a constant teacher. Long before she stepped foot in a formal classroom, she had a rich curriculum planned out for me. There were no easy answers, only invitations to explore. Whenever I expressed an opinion, the counterpoint was raised so I could clarify and strengthen my argument. She never just agreed with me. This was...absolutely infuriating, but she never yielded. When I asked why, she would tell me that there was no perfection, but that we can always improve.
And improve she did. It's only with the benefit of hindsight—and the experience of being a parent myself—that I finally understand what a remarkable feat it was for Mom to go back to college with a small child. Not for business or engineering, but to become that most unlikely of things: an English teacher—with a minor in theater.
I have such fond memories of spending long nights at Ursinus College with mom, in the dingy old black-box theater of Ritter Hall, as she helped prepare the costumes for a production of "The Tempest." My Shakespeare education started long before high school, and I was a theater kid before I even knew how to be one. The joy of a successful performance is yet another lesson Mom imparted. Again, her love of humanity shone through. Her passion for theater seemed to shout: look at the beautiful things we can accomplish when we work together; look how we can make the audience feel with our craft.
Look at the stories we can share. Look at how we can inspire.
And then I stepped into her actual classroom.
I am often asked whether it was awkward having my mother as my English teacher for two years of high school. In fact, she was the best teacher I ever had. She pushed us all to think beyond our limited experience. She introduced us to worlds we had never known—never could know except through the lens of literature. Mom made sure to go beyond the traditional literary canon so that our horizons were broadened. It wasn't always easy for her: imagine getting a classroom full of prep school boys to care about Toni Morrison, about Zora Neale Hurston, about Edith Wharton, about Langston Hughes—enough to engage in week-long debates about the text. She was tough as nails.
Everyone present remembers the "College" incident.
One day in Mom's class, we were all getting particularly out of hand—just being your run-of-the-mill high school jackasses. She didn't yell. She didn't ask us to quiet down. She calmly walked to the blackboard, faced us, and without looking behind her wrote "College?" in exquisite cursive.
We shut up immediately, and a legend was born. But why? It wasn't just the cool factor of the move. It was that we knew she got us. More than that, she wanted all of us to succeed, so much so that it pained her when we got in our own way. She treated every boy in her class like he was her son. I had so many brothers in those classes, and she loved us all.
She marked our papers in green ink. It was a hassle to find green pens before Amazon was Amazon, but I scoured stores and websites to maintain the supply for her. Why green? Because she wanted the comments to feel like feedback, not corrections. She wanted her students to feel supported, not judged.
I can't say whether Mom's years in the classroom were her best years, but they were the ones I knew best, and the ones that revealed and engaged the best parts of her: her brilliance, her passion, and her ability to inspire. All of us who had the privilege of being her students are better for it, the trajectories of our lives inexorably changed for passing through her classroom door.
Despite my best efforts, she inspired me to teach as well. I even taught English for some time. And yes: I marked my students' papers in green.
Mom and I both believed that being a teacher was not a job. It wasn't even a vocation. It was something deeper, something intrinsic to humanity that our species requires. We need someone in the village to gather children in one place, to watch them, guide them, and tell the stories that make a people who they are. Every culture has this role regardless of its title or the shape of the building in which the storytelling takes place. Teaching is inextricable from humanity.
Mom would say, "You're a teacher because you don't know how not to be." I have gone to school to learn how to be the best educator possible. I have taught in elite schools, in martial arts gyms, and online for literally tens of thousands of students. The best parts of what I know about teaching still come from Mom's classroom. It ultimately comes down to one core belief: we can all do better if someone believes in us. She believed in us. She believed in me.
We're at the end of Mom's story, but her impact lives on in all the students she inspired, all the lives she touched, and in her family, who will keep her passion and faith alive. I regret that Mom never got to meet her granddaughter in person, but she will grow up surrounded by these inheritances: literature, poetry, musical theater, the promise of the sky, and our unwavering faith in her.
Mom wasn't perfect. There is no perfect. But it's the reaching for it that matters. Like Gatsby, Mom returned to the edge of her pier to dream of a better tomorrow, and invited us to join her in that dream.
It eluded her then, but that’s no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms further… And one fine morning—
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
Thank you for all the stories, Mom. I will keep telling yours.