Margaret Bulkley Fager Eulogy by Jeff Fager

Our mom loved this church. She came here on many Sundays. We went through Sunday school here. Chris and Greg were acolytes here. Mary Lou and Jim were married here.

That was the only time, and when Greg and Faye had Elsbeth and Brad baptized here, that our Dad came. He went to work every Sunday morning doing rounds and seeing all his patients, and she covered for him.

"He's doing the Lord's work," she told us, and it made sense.

She wasn't religious. She just liked it here. She liked the service. She liked the music. She really belted it out. I remember as a kid looking up at her. She loved the hymns, and she was a pretty good singer.

She liked the ceremony. With one complaint. When the Episcopal Church added the exchange of peace, saying peace and shaking hands with everyone around you.

Why do we have to do that?

She was also drawn here by genetics. The Bulkley family was one of the first families in Massachusetts. She was of the 12th generation. The patriarch, the Reverend Peter Bulkley, founded Concord, Massachusetts, when he started his church there straight off the boat. And the lore of that was present in her life. She was proud of it. She gave all of her sons the name Bulkley. They were all proud of it, the Bulkleys. Probably to a fault, she felt, as did her brother Charles, our beloved uncle who came to see us all of the time, that they fell back on the name as if it were an accomplishment in and of itself.

The Bulkleys I knew, including our mom, had similar traits: a noble bearing, with a devilish quality. She was always in on the joke. And she didn't hold much back.

"Oh, Chris, you like shaving your head like that?"

She was formed by a childhood that was magical and difficult at the same time.

She described her mother, whom we never knew because she lost her at the tender age of 21, as an angel. Her father was deaf by accident and never got similar praise. Her oldest two brothers were also angels to her: her brother Charles and her brother Seymour, who was like a father to her.

We heard about the horse he gave her as a young girl. A big-hearted person whom she also lost at a tragically young age.

Losing her mother was devastating, but she was lucky. She met her mate right around the same time. Their life together lasted almost 70 years. It was a wonderful life together, with lots of love and so few tense moments that I don't remember any, though they must have disagreed.

How blessed we were to have the two of them as parents. She was a selfless, loving, dedicated partner to him. And an amazing mother. She knew how she wanted to raise her kids, and she later became an open book for us about how to raise ours. Gommy dedicated her life to her family. She taught us all about everything. They worked as a perfect pair, and they never contradicted each other when it came to us.

They set strict limits. Though she always made things fun, and they played no favorites, except that their one daughter was held in a special place for each of them.

That relationship, the mother-daughter relationship, was a lot like Mary Lou's relationship with her own children. They spoke almost every single day. Soon after Mary Lou moved to New York with two young babies and missing her mom, she was sick as a dog. Physically ill. Her milk dried up, so she couldn't feed Margaret. And she couldn't get out of bed.

As Jim left for work and she pleaded for help, he said, "You should call your mom." Mary Lou was reluctant, as we all were, at the risk of sounding like she was complaining. But she called, and Maggie gave her advice: "You're just going to have to get down and crawl." It was how they raised us all. You need to pull yourself through this.

Maureen Curran entered our lives because she was helping their good friends, Dr. and Mrs. Stair, when our folks needed someone to come and help them. She was driven by the house, and she looked at it and said no, that doesn't fit me at all. But she came into the kitchen to meet Gommy and didn't want to leave.

Maureen became another daughter over more than 30 years. And we are all so fortunate to have had her in our lives. And Maureen felt fortunate to fall into their grasp. Thank God for Maureen, and for our cousin Elizabeth, Seymour's daughter, and her other adopted child, who were both an important part of her life until the very end.

They experienced the kindness and goodness that so many people experienced with them: family, friends, and strangers. At a restaurant, if you were a waiter, you couldn't wait on Maggie without giving up, before the end of the meal, all of your vital statistics.

She was a social animal. She loved people.

Everyone who came through that kitchen door was welcome. The milkman carrying the fresh milk was as welcome as our pals with their six-packs. She loved that our home was a place where our friends liked to come. And they felt her warmth. She was fun. And light.

She wasn't shocked or offended by our generational differences. She fit in. One of my good pals ran away from home in high school, and I asked her, "Would it be okay if David lives here for a while?" And she said yes, of course, he can live here. I know that he will never forget that. He loved her forever.

She was shaken to the core when her last child left for college. That changed her. She talked about it. She had lost her purpose, and she said that out loud. She watched the school bus leave from the corner every morning, and she found herself in a predicament. An empty nest at the same time his career was flourishing. An existential question for a woman who never liked to over-analyze anything. But it changed her. The success she had in raising her children and running her family, running the budget, and running the house became her defining achievement.

We remember Maggie, and we can learn from her as a woman of real integrity and honesty. She never cut corners. I never witnessed that. She was honest, and loving, and yes, I already said direct.

My favorite line when toasting before a meal: we don't all have to clink.

Her last seven or eight years were very difficult. Someone might say it was a blessing that she lived until 90. But it wasn't a blessing. She was cursed in those years.

She had some form of ALS and was gradually paralyzed from the waist down. A symptom of that disease is known as locked-in syndrome, and the manifestation is frustration. A strong, athletic woman with a body that wouldn't respond. Part of what made it hard was that she didn't see herself as a cripple, and she couldn't stand that others might. She fell a few times in the kitchen, and rather than call anybody, she crawled her way to the other room to boost herself up on the couch.

I remember my dreams in those final years. They were vivid. All of a sudden, she could walk, and I was excited, and she wasn't. Because it wasn't real. Mary Lou had the exact same dreams.

It was hard to see her in that state. When we lost him, we all gathered at the house. Except her. I went with her directly from the service back to the Stone Institute. I couldn't get her to laugh that day. She knew.

Ralph Waldo Emerson was a member of our family. He was a Bulkley. He wrote so many memorable things, and he wrote this: "Men are what their mothers made them."

All of us in this family are what she made us. And she made us all better than we otherwise would have been.