Bittersweet epitaph is gift to mother — and from her

"She died with all her music in her."

These are the words my mother indicated that she wanted inscribed on her tombstone, and they generated a mixture of confusion and differing opinions among her children and their families. What did Mom mean by these words? We had found her written request among her papers, along with her last "will and testament" and other legal documents, as we were preparing for her funeral in November 2000.

These words saddened me greatly. I interpreted them to mean that Mom died feeling unfulfilled — that she felt that no one had really heard "her music." Several family members concurred with my interpretation; a few disagreed, saying that they thought Mom wanted to be remembered as a woman who was full of music — a happy, joyful soul.

Four months after Mom's death, as we continued to sift through years of memorabilia and seemingly endless piles of paper, we unearthed a time-worn but still intact scrap of paper inscribed with a four-line poem. Finding this piece of poetry unexpectedly clarified the vexing mystery of interpretation about Mom's inscription request. We conjectured that the poem had most likely been given to her by her first husband, my Dad, who had died very suddenly and unexpectedly at age 46.

At the time of his death, he and Mom had been married a scant 11 years and were raising their four young children. Mom and Dad had shared a mutual love of poetry and all forms of literature during their courtship, and the written word had continued to give them joy during their all-too-brief years together.

The complete poem displayed on the tattered piece of paper (no author cited) solidified my suspicion that Mom had bottled up a deep sadness of which none of us was ever fully aware. The poem, in its entirety, read as follows:

A few can touch a magic string

and noisy fame is glad to win them

Alas! for those who never sing

and die with all their music in them

At the time of Mom's funeral, I learned that the young girl known as "Petey" had always dreamed of becoming an interpretive dancer. Instead, the self-described free-spirited bohemian became a schoolteacher, a profession considered more "suitable" for a woman born in the early 1900s. After her marriage and the births of her first four children, Mom no longer dreamed of being a dancer; however, she did aspire to be a writer — a dream that seemed more feasible for a busy mother.

That dream was deferred for the most part, though, as she found herself in the role of mother to nine children within a decade of my father's death. Three years after being widowed, our household swelled to include seven children when Mom married a widower with three children of his own. During the following six years, my mother gave birth to three more children, two of whom survived. Between running a huge household and her involvement with church and school activities, she had little time to "sing" her song.

For 15 months after Mom's death, debate about her tombstone inscription request continued. These words were a painful reminder to us of a woman who had seemed outwardly happy with life, but who had been silently crying out in frustration, as illustrated by a number of poems she'd written when her children were young. One particular poem still haunts me two years after I read it, as I recall Mom's plaintive last line: "And, then, I ask myself: where did my spirit go?"

Yes, Mom's tombstone request would remind us of her quashed dreams; still, we felt that this brief, but eloquent, revision of a line of poetry might also inspire those who saw it to touch their own "magic string" so that their "music" could be heard.

In February 2002, wanting to honor one of Mom's last wishes, our family gave the order to cemetery personnel to inscribe her tombstone with the words: "She died with all her music in her." Over time, I have come to feel that Mom's final words, now literally "carved in stone," were one of the most important gifts she left us.

Postscript: As we found and compiled the scattered pieces of her writings, most of which were penned during her senior years, we were to discover that Petey was a talented, prolific, but rarely published writer. Sandwiched between stacks of handwritten and typed works of prose and poetry, I found the following tribute to my father; it had been typed on a piece of now-yellowing paper. By including this poem here, I hope to help ensure that some of Mom's beautiful music is heard, even if posthumously.

A dull pervading twilight gloom,

A burning log-fire's fitful gleam,

And you beside me in the room —

I lie, and think, and doze to dream.

And all at once there is a thrill,

I know the heights and depths of bliss,

A longing stops; my heart is still

I sense your warmth, I feel your kiss.

You are the essence of the room,

You are the firelight's fitful gleam

I touch you in the gathering gloom —

You are the thinking and the dream.

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