One year ago, the Washington Nationals won the World Series. Subsequently, National sports reporter, Erik Brady, wrote a column about his mother, Eileen, and her devotion to the newly crowned MLB World Champions. He published that column on Halloween, which is the anniversary of his mother’s death.
The column struck a chord with me for a number of reasons, particularly due to a Halloween tradition my kids and I enjoyed with Mrs. Brady. That led me to respond to Erik’s column with one of my own.
As Halloween is upon us, I’m inspired to once again share this column in tribute to a special lady with a joyous heart who loved to have fun and make people smile.
Erik Brady, I enjoyed your post today about your mother and her devotion to the baseball team that has become the 2019 MLB World Champion Washington Nationals.
As always it was a great piece of journalism. You carry your father's tradition of weaving words into engaging stories with your own special style.
Funny that today was the day you wrote about your mother, as every year on All Hallows Eve, I think of and honor her.
I certainly was not a close family friend of your parents, nor did I grow up spending time with you and your siblings (though your sister, Chris, was my math tutor “savior” in high school!)
Rather, I came to know your mother through marriage....mine into the Abt Family who had been longtime neighbors of the Bradys.
That nuptial allowed me entry into the magical world of your father's annual Christmas cards, a tradition unlike any I had ever known and which I valued enough to save each year's hand-crafted edition.
My marriage also brought me into the circle of love and kindness that your mother extended to all within her realm. Her soft voice and welcoming ways soon made me feel as if I were family....and that's how my husband, daughter and I ended up living in your home one summer.
We'd returned to Kenmore following my husband's college graduation. It was a time of school loan debt, three mouths to feed, no home and no immediate job prospects for either one of us.
Thankfully my parents offered us my childhood bedroom as a temporary respite until our fortunes changed. Needless to say, it wasn't ideal.
That's where your mother changed our lives.
It was June, 1972. As was the Brady tradition, your parents had relocated to Canadian side of Lake Erie for the summer. Your family's Kenmore home was vacant.
One day, in the course of conversation between your mother and my mother-in-law, the topic of my family's living situation came up. Without hesitation, your mother graciously offered to allow us to move into your family’s home as a summer respite.
It was quite a transition for me, a 19-year old new mom, to occupy the spaces of a woman like your mother. Each room of that house was filled with elements of beauty and vestiges of family as I had never experienced. It was also defined by traces of the real life challenges she balanced in her many roles as caregiver, wife, mother, grandmother, community volunteer and her own woman.
Occasionally your mother would cross the border and stop by the house. We would visit. No matter the daily chores or the latest crisis she was managing, she was always cheerful in both her conversation and outlook. It was a life lesson I took from her and continue to try and emulate to this day.
By the end of that summer, my husband found employment and we were able to move into a home of our own. Yet that relocation didn't end the connection between our families.
As years passed, your father's Christmas cards arrived like clockwork, reflecting the decades-old neighborhood ties that bound us. Then there was a special tradition that your mother and I developed on our own.
On Halloween every year, no matter where in Western New York we lived, I would put my kids in the car and drive them to your house. There under the bright light of your welcoming front entry, we would undertake the requisite knocking on the door and shouting out, "trick or treat."
Within seconds your mother would answer our call...or should I say a Halloween apparition would answer.... as in the spirit of the season you mother would always be in costume.
It was hard to judge who enjoyed the experience more....my children who were amazed at someone handing out candy in full Halloween regalia....or your mother who delighted in measuring the passage of time by the evolution of my children in age and size.
Eileen Brady was a remarkable woman and one I wish I had known better. No doubt she possessed an innate life wisdom that carried her through each day and made better the lives of all she touched in her caring ways.
They say on All Hallows Eve "the veil between the worlds" is at its thinnest and those how have passed can, and do, walk among us. I don't know that I believe such things are true, but I do know each year on this day I remember your mother and share her story with my children and grandchildren as my way of keeping her caring spirit in our lives.
Here is a link to Erik Brady’s original column about his mother.