JB School

People seemed to like my last speech post, so I thought I'd share the tribute speech I gave last Saturday. There should have been a video for this, but unfortunately the recorder didn't work quite right, so you won't be seeing me stumbling through this. In any case, here it is - it seemed to go over pretty well.

"Good morning. I'd like to take a moment to tell you all about my favorite cyborg. Like many of you, I've chosen to make my tribute speech about my mother because she is special to me, but I'd like to think that my mother, Kathy, is simply special. Over the years, she's shown incredible personal strength, overwhelming familial support, and a wealth of skill and creativity in any endeavor she's chosen.

My mom has Parkinson's disease. For those of you not familiar with the disease, it is a disorder that impairs motor function due to problems in generating and utilizing dopamine, causing tremors, speech impairment, and lack of mobility. Michael J. Fox has brought a lot of visibility to the disease lately, but at this time there is no known cure. My mom was first diagnosed over 15 years ago, and at that time, the expected median mortality was a decade.

Mom has always been a fighter; she hasn't let the disease define her, hasn't given up, and continues to live life just as fully as she always has. While her handwriting has noticeably degraded over time, her other symptoms have proved to be largely manageable through a combination of determination, medication, and an experimental surgery performed a few years back, here at OHSU. My mom now has a chip implanted in her brain to assist with signal transmission, and a battery pack in her chest. She even comes with a remote control now, to adjust the signal level.

She's shown her strength in other ways as well, especially in supporting my brother and myself as we've grown. We've both had difficulty in school, for a variety of reasons. Neither of us took high school very seriously, and have spent the last several years in and out of college. She never gave us a hard time about it, and let us both come to the decision to give school a real try for our own reasons, backing us to the hilt each time we found a new direction to try. When I decided to join the Navy, she supported me there too, even though it would mean rarely getting to see me for years at a time, and there was a very real chance that her disease would get much worse while I was gone. Later, when it was time to leave the Navy to be with my wife Jessie, she helped me figure out how to make it happen. Not long after that, she helped me to survive when Jessie passed away. I think that time was especially hard for her; she had treated Jessie like the daughter she'd never had, and had become quite close. Even though she was hurting immensely from the loss, she put me first, and helped me see that there were many reasons to still participate in living from day to day.

When I was very young, my mother had a business called "Sunshine Originals", a venue for selling crafty things she'd made. One set of items I particularly remember are the sewn dolls she'd put together. It always amazed me how much personality she put into a few square inches of fabric. She gave up that business when we moved to Oregon to follow my father's practice and found a new outlet in painting and pastels. One of my most prized possessions that I've had for over a decade now is a pastel she did of my first cat, Scamp - somehow I can still feel him watching me through the still paper. One of her most recent projects have been "dream boxes"; paper-craft boxes containing words, miniatures, and pieces of anything that seems appropriate. Though many of the components are goodwill finds, she manages to personify the recipient's hopes and wishes through the minuscule imagery found within, often without ever meeting the person that the box is made for.

I shouldn't lead you to think that all is perfection in our relationship; we disagree on a number of things, and even fight from time to time. All that aside, the bottom line is that I couldn't ask for a better mom. She's helped me to get where I am today, not by telling me what I should do or doing things for me, but by showing me what kind of person I should try to be."