Joann VanEsselstyn

Dave’s words of remembrance

I’m excited to share some appreciations and reflections on a great woman, my mom. Thank you for coming.

Before I talk about my mom, I’m going to spend a second talking about her mom. My grandmother. My Oma.

My Oma, Hanny Gathman, had emigrated from Germany in the 1920s with her husband, Franz Tummel, and started a family, a boy, Kenneth, and two girls - Evelyn and the youngest - my mom - Joann, and started a confectionary business slash luncheonette in the Gramarcy Park neighborhood of manhattan.

My Oma came to live with us when my sister Gretchen and I were in grade school. Growing up with her was one of the great aspects of childhood. She was funny and strict and caring

This was a woman with extreme discipline. Raising multiple kids in manhattan, while running a business as an immigrant. My Oma was was kind, but at times stern and had a deep appreciation for things being in their right place.

And yet when something was out of place in our house, down the street from here at 80 colonial drive, often out of place as a result of my doing, my Oma, my grandmother, would implore me to correct it by giving a glimpse of stress, and saying, “You know your mother”.

I want to spend a little time this morning unpacking that phrase - what she meant by “knowing my mother”.

On the surface she meant that my my mom was particular about things.

Our house was always impeccably clean.

My mom’s penmanship was famously straight and ordered.

My mom’s work ethic was unmatched, always to bed early, and up extremely early, sitting at our round kitchen table getting her lessons ready, grading done, meals planned, family breakfasts made. Dolly Parton and Olivia Newton John on the AM radio

Two weeks before thanksgiving, the table was set, and all of the serving vessels had notes inside them, signifying what dishes they’d come to hold.

It was just how she was, and that organization propelled her to great successes on so many fronts.

There is a risk that such a force of nature who could exert her control so adeptly over her time, her home, her classroom, her meals, her writing, might overplay those instincts on the parenting front. That those instincts might lead to helicopter parenting. Parents seeking control over their kids, like Holden Caufield trying to catch falling kids in the Rye, saving them from the cruel world.

I want to thank my mom today for not doing that. For instead encouraging my sister and I, (pause) without micromanaging our actions and intentions.

I think that she was able to do this because her unique drive and organizational prowess was matched with an equally unique capacity to love that I think we are all blessed to all have had and know in our lives.

I am not saying my mom didn’t have impulses to control my sister and myself at times.

And Gretchen and I, through no intentional wickedness, would sometimes put that unconditional love and support to the test. Bucking the trends and norms we were raised with here in Fairfield.

I will share one quick example of testing her limits, one of the many.

In my early twenties, I spent time living in a spiritual community in the Sierra Nevada foothills of California called Ananda. Our community followed the teachings of Yogi Parmahansa Yogananda. It was an amazing place, a 5000 acre community, which the unacquainted may have described as a “cult”.

My mom, and my dad perhaps concerned about this development, nonetheless came to visit. They beamed and after returning to Fairfeld wrote me a letter the next week to joke that they wanted to come, and move out there with me, and join Ananda. (See ya, First Church Congregational.)

We recounted that trip as being one of the great adventures in togetherness until the end of her life.

There are many more examples and through just about all of them, Oma’s love and support filled my sister and me. Drove us to explore ourselves and our surroundings thoroughly and with wonder, awe and confidence, not the fear of parental judgement. The opposite of that.

And I say this as a parent now, as my own daughters, making their own way through the world, I do my best to be supportive, curious, generous and encouraging, and abate impulses toward fear, judgement and control. I’m lucky to have learned that from my mom.

When I think of the phrase, then, my grandmother saying, “you know your mother”, I know my mother as a partner on that visit to california.

Exploring, sharing, appreciating, encouraging, with a sense of wonderment and deep love for others, and for life.

And, my mom didn’t just bring those qualities out for special occasions and trips. She lived them continuously.

When I went to my her retirement party from the Fairfield public schools twenty five years ago, I was struck, I’m still struck and moved twenty five years later, by the outpouring of love for her. Mimi Man iss cal co and others taking turns talking about the deep, long “Joann” hugs that she’d give generously to her colleagues, that filled others with palpable hope and love.

We are all so lucky to have felt that hug. Let us all carry on with the courage and intrepid exploratory loving attitude that it propelled in her students, her friends, her church, her colleagues, my sister, myself, my dad, my daughters, my wife and all of us.

I’m left thinking of my Mom in the Rye, not catching the falling children but instead embracing the and propelling them forward. All of them, and all of us, better for feeling her deep, transformative, unconditional love.