Kelly Corrigan

Strangely and unexpectedly, about a month after I gave my TED Talk, my mom died.

I had been waiting to share the talk with her until the video was ready, and so she never got to see it or hear it.

On my podcast, Kelly Corrigan Wonders, we release three episodes every week.

On Sundays, I share a eulogy sent in to us by a listener so that we might remember the important ways that we affect one another.

And most of those eulogies are children talking about their parents.

And when you listen to these week after week after week, you start to have a sense of what a parent is for.

It's the crazy specificity of every one of us, the idiosyncratic natures that we come to accept over a lifetime.

And I have long believed that that acceptance of each other as we are is kind of the Mount Everest of human emotions.

I wrote a eulogy for my mom.

Here's a few words from the complete eulogy, which I shared on my podcast.

last year, shortly after my mom passed.

Here's what you'd learn walking around the first floor of my mother's house.

She loved games, backgammon, rummy cube, dominoes.

You'd see that she read the paper and did the sudoku and the jumble.

You'd figure out that she had asthma by the inhalers in every drawer and that she liked her nails neat by the files next to each inhaler.

You would gather from her vintage pots and pans that she did not cook much and from the tiny dregs of Cheetos that she kept rolled and rubber banded that she didn't eat much.

You would see that she liked Folgers Instant and that she kept it in a cupboard next to the Miracle-Gro, a placement that always worried me but that I was not at liberty to change.

I loved having a mom.

I have felt that acutely since becoming one.

Specifically, I loved having her as a mom.