Mom, In Memoriam

Edith Engel, 6/27/36  -  3/20/85

She grew up in Speden, Alberta, Canada --a town so small, it no longer exists. After graduating first in her class at the University of Alberta, Mom was offered a job as Head Dietician at Cedar-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles.  She eagerly packed her bags, bound for a great career move, American citizenship, life in a bustling city, and...

In June of 1964, Mom met and married Dad. (Last year, I finally did the basic math; it seems my parents likely had a shotgun wedding, since they married three weeks after they met, and my sister was born 8 months later.) Mom wanted four kids: two girls and two boys. Dad agreed, it seems, because that's what they got. 

Years passed. Antsy for a new challenge, Mom enrolled in law school. She'd graduate second in her class and pass the State Bar on round one --all while in her 40s, with four kids at home. I'd never seen her so content. Mom told me that raising a family and working full-time as a lawyer was "like having the best of both worlds."

The call came on Halloween night, 1984. "Your mother's very sick," Dad said. Medical staff talked coldly about an aggressive cancer that had started in her colon and spread rapidly to assault the rest of Mom's body. I spent the next five months juggling freshman classes, and watching my mother shrivel into a ghostly skeleton on the hospital bed that dominated our house. Three months short of her 50th birthday, Mom took her final breath.

Over 300 people attended the funeral. Everybody loved Mom. She shone with an angelic, calming presence; an unassuming competence and brilliance; and a deeply humble, giving nature.

Mom left behind a broken family, lost in a world she had made more beautiful. 

I miss her every day.