The last thing to go

Five years ago this month, my mom, Erma, passed away, and she left a memory of her sense of humor with us. Her family will read this and think, “Well, she was humorous in spite of herself.” It is true: Mom was born with an underdeveloped funny bone and had to rely on others to tickle that bone into maturity. She grew up in the farmlands of Iowa, where unfortunately for her folks’ humor could be as dry as the corncobs in the cattle crib.

When Mom married Dad, she discovered his sense of humor was also understated, so if she was not diligent, his wit could pass her right by. His quiet humor could not always penetrate through the struggle to raise five children on a country preacher’s income, and after one of my brothers died, followed by Dad fourteen years later, it was pretty hard for Mom to gather resources for hilarity.

Yet, she could be easily amused. Let a man, be it her sons, brother-in-law, or my husband, tease her, he could inevitably pull out a good laugh. Once she got a joke, which often flew over her head at first, she would titter—a few seconds behind the rest of us. She liked to recall stories from her past, especially about the time she and a fellow female pastor of a rural Iowan church fed the parish rats poison with a spoon. Humor bordering on the macabre, but hey, it qualifies.

She herself was a comedian without knowing it, and sometimes in a most impious way, which made her even more funny. She had a way of choosing the wrong word that sounded similar to the one she wanted, or slightly mispronouncing the correct word. To preserve the sanctity of her name, I will only give the mildest example of these. Never one to swear, nevertheless when she felt strongly about a subject, she would say in that voice which needed no microphone, “And I am a-dam-ant about it!”

Mom’s crowning funny story occurred just days before she passed away. Her illness had for months presented doctors with great challenges to keep her system in balance, and as she now lay in the hospital, they told her, “We are between a rock and a hard place.” She picked up on this idiom and said to my sister, “I wish that Moses would come and strike the rock.” She was referring to the Bible story in which water gushed out of a desert rock that Moses struck with his staff, bringing relief to God’s people. My sister reminded her that there was a verse in the New Testament about that rock being a type of Christ. The need to know where the verse was bugged Mom from that point on.

As soon as my sister-in-law and I walked in the next morning, she ordered us to find the reference, but we could not. As providence would have it, the chaplain on duty arrived, but before the woman could read a psalm and pray with us, Mom—from behind her oxygen mask—plied her with the verse reference question. The minister smiled and said, “Well since I’m a Jewish rabbi, I don’t know the New Testament very much. But after we’re done here, I’ll go right down and ask one of the other chaplains.” Mom accepted this; to her, being a rabbi was no excuse for not knowing the New Testament.

True to her word, the rabbi quickly returned with the answer. She said, “It took a rabbi, a priest, and a minister, but we finally found it—on the internet.”

At least the search had kept those three out of the proverbial bar.

We laughed over the story until Mom said, “Tell it at my funeral service.” She had come full circle and acquired an exquisite blend of a lifetime of faith in Christ, devotion to the Scriptures, and now at last a developed sense of humor.


*The New Testament reference to Moses' rock is 1 Cor. 10:1-4.