We laid my mom to rest today in Kansas City. I gave the following eulogy at her funeral.
If you knew my mom, Dr. Harriet Barrish, well, it might surprise you to know that she did not leave instructions for what I am about to say on a Post-It note or a 3x5 notecard. And I’m pretty sure she wouldn’t laugh about me saying that in front of all of you.
I’ll never forget the many boxes of cookies she baked and shipped to Laura’s parents’ house in Colorado to keep frozen until it was time for our wedding so that all of the nearly two hundred people attending would be greeted by them in their hotel rooms. I confirmed with Laura’s mom, Sue, that each box contained layers of cookies, none of which contained a single broken cookie. Each box came wrapped and taped so meticulously, they were nearly impossible to open. I’m fairly certain each box also contained a handwritten note with instructions so detailed, they left no margin for error or mishandling.
In elementary school, for every Thanksgiving, she famously made many trays of candy turkeys with a malted milk ball (one of my dad’s favorite candies), two Brach’s chocolate stars and some red icing for the beak and wattle, for our entire class.
Cakes were baked and hand-decorated for our early childhood birthdays. There were Hannuakah cookie decorating parties with the cousins, for which she would make hundreds of cookies in advance. She sent cookies to my homes and offices in Los Angeles over the years, always wrapped with plenty of bubble wrap with fragile and perishable written extra large on the outside of the box in hopes that the US Postal Service would handle them carefully.
Earlier this week, I was reflecting on the fact that I never really witnessed her laughing uncontrollably. Hopefully she’ll forgive me analyzing her, but everything she did was in-control. That said, she did seem to favor the raunchiest, most wildly inappropriate humor, often spewed by her other son, Jonas. You knew you got her when she tried her best not to laugh, but could not help letting a little laughter out as she shook her head, muttering your name in an ever-so-gentle disapproving tone.
I loved her sense of humor. We shared a love of dark and often absurdist humor. We bonded over Far Side comics by Gary Larson and anything in that general vicinity. I was looking back through my text messages with her this week and this is one example of something she would send me.
Picture a single-frame comic. On the bottom of the comic it reads, “The dating life of a placebo was rarely a fruitful one.”
Two pills are sitting at a table. One pill explains, “I help people with their allergies. In fact, I came here straight from the pharmacy. What about you?”
And the other pill responds, “Honestly, I don’t really do much of anything.”
It was the perfect combination of absurdity and psychology.
I loved her brutal honesty. Sometimes it flattered, sometimes it stung, but sometimes the truth hurts. I appreciated her directness. God help you if you condescended to her or spoke to her as if she were an invalid as she was declining. She could immediately identify bullshitters and those that genuinely cared about her, especially as she had a revolving door of caretakers over the last few years. She formed bonds with them and enjoyed their company, on her terms, of course. I know their care meant a lot to her and to our family.
Aside from her wicked sense of humor and brutal honesty, I have a profound appreciation for her intellect and thoughtfulness. I loved discussing psychology and talking to her about parenting. Her entire demeanor and tone changed. It woke something up in her. She also enjoyed discussing her work with other professionals in her field. I was alone with mom a day or two before she passed and a chaplain visited her. He was also a PhD and had worked with school students for many years. He mentioned how wonderful it was to discuss their work with kids. He said he could tell how intelligent she was, even in her advanced state of illness.
She was so proud of her education, credentials and accomplishments. After all, it’s almost entirely what her obituary talks about, which by the way she wrote most of, and of course chose the photo as well. In parenthesis, at the end of the paper copy she left for us she wrote, “Say whatever else you want to say about me.”
The work she pioneered, some of which is still actively cited, and all the people she helped will be a lasting and perhaps infinite legacy. I’ll never forget stumbling upon a mention of her name on Wikipedia, in the context of some of the research she did as a graduate student at KU. I had Jonas print it out for her to read. After she read it, she left me a voicemail and you could hear the pride in her voice. You could tell it mattered a great deal that the research she conducted in the 1960s was not only remembered and documented for anyone in the world to see, but also that prestigious institutions like Johns Hopkins were building upon her original research.
My dad’s best friend, Gary Orren, sent us the kindest note upon finding out about Mom’s death. In the note he explained:
She had a rare intellect, with no need to prove that she was the smartest person in the room. She just knew it, and that was enough. No arrogance.
It’s not an overstatement to say that my mom changed and even saved many lives through her work. She pioneered research that has had a lasting impact. She was immensely proud of the work she and my late father did and I’m certain she would have kept working if it weren’t for Parkinson’s disease. It gave her purpose and meaning and I’m not sure she found the same kind of purpose or meaning once she could no longer practice.
I’m so grateful she was my mom, and I’m proud to be her son. And I am especially grateful to have had the privilege of being with her in her final days. It feels impossible not to consider our mortality in moments like this, but I believe that you can live a better, more intentional and honest life when you do.
