The eulogy that I gave today at the Memorial Service:
Today we are here in Memory of my Mother, Susan Golshani. She was very independent, strong willed, witty, had a dry sense of humor, and was very much a person who never knew a stranger. She was married and divorced 4 times. She traveled quite a bit – as she told me the English love to roam the earth. She not only only marched to the beat of a different drummer, but she danced, ran, and even some times crawled to that beat. Her life was anything but mundane.
When we look at her life we need to think of a prism and it's different colors – so depending on your perspective of a prism you can see red, blue, yellow and so forth. So it is with Susan's life. At different periods of her life you will see her with different perspectives.
Her life was altered at a young age. She was born in England during World War II. But about 8 months later she lost the father that she never really knew, Eric Anthony Tweedale-Hill in the battle of El-Almein. But her Mother married an American air force captain, grandpa Freedman, who became the father that she knew for the rest of her life.
She remembered growing up that sometimes it felt like life in a fishbowl. You have an English Mother and a Jewish Father and you live in a small midwestern town in the 1950's. So you are very much an oddity, everyone is curious about you.
But it is around this time that she discovered horses and grew in love with them. The family would sometimes vacation out West and go to Dude ranches. They had a place where they kept horses here outside Lewisburg and she would sometimes ride a horse to the swimming pool in West Alexandria.
She met my Dad and married him at an early age. They lived on a farm where of course they raised horses and had 4 kids. She decided after 13 years that she had had enough of this life and left. We kids didn't understand what all was happening, but my Dad stepped up, persevered and raised us.
This was where Mom's life took a dark turn. She had married at a young age and I think she wanted to explore what all she had missed. She got into drugs and eventually got into heroin. She describes knowing people that had been shot and killed over drugs and also knew people that been the shooter over drugs. She herself had been shot at.
Once when we were talking I mentioned that I only watched a part of Breaking Bad because it was so dark and I couldn't stand what people were doing to one another. She told me that desperate people do desperate things. That the portrayal of people in that series wasn't far off.
She eventually was busted with drugs and sent to prison in Mississippi. She was able to get a pardon from the governor and was released. However a local TV station made a big stink about a drug dealer being released from prison and she was warned that the pardon was about to be revoked.
So she fled to Europe where she got a British passport. She traveled around Europe, North Africa, and spent some time in Portugal before settling down in London. I did find out later that she spent some time in jail in Europe as well. But she met Ali Golshani at the Playboy Club. She married him and went to Iran where she helped a professor translate ancient texts into English.
But after a couple of years the Iranian Revolution happened and relatives told her that people were wanting to turn her in, so she fled across the border and back to Europe.
She had tired of life on the lam and decided to come back to America. She turned herself into the authorities in Mississippi and served her prison term. Then she came to Ohio and served out a prison sentence here. I remember visiting her at the prison in Marysville.
She was eventually released and bought a house in Dayton and settled down. But she rented the basement out to a fellow who got mixed up with a drug dealer and owed him money. The dealer decided to get revenge by getting a can of gasoline and went around the house and set it on fire.
The guy in the basement got out OK. But Mom got confused – she got lost in her own house. She ended back at the stairway and she sat down thinking this is it, I am going to die. But the guy in the basement went back in and found her and got her out.
But by that time she had 2nd and 3rd degree burns on almost half her body and the doctor said that she had a 25% chance to live. She had a rough go of it in the burn unit but she pulled through. I asked her about it later and she said that when they were doing debridement treatments that there were times that she wished she was dead.
After this incident, her life began to go a different direction. She bought some land in Southeast Ohio and got back into horses again. She became president of a chapter of AA in Cambridge, OH. I later found her AA tokens when she was moving out West. I never knew that she had a drinking problem but maybe she had an addictive personality that contributed to her problems with alcohol and heroin. Up until that point, I did not know of this and later when I went through her stuff, I found some letters from people thanking her for helping to change their lives around and getting sober.
At this point in her life, she seemed to have found peace and contentment. She made one last move to New Mexico to satisfy a dream that she had always had to have a ranch out West. About a year ago we had a talk there on the ranch and made our peace with one another. She apologized for leaving us. I told her that as a person we are the sum total of all of our experiences and people we deal with – both good and bad. So yes it hurt when she left but the challenges and changes that happened help shape us kids into the people that we became.
I told her that I learned from her to accept people that are different from us and by the same token, not to be afraid of being different from everyone else. To keep an open mind and also to be adventurous. We were allowed to bicycle 4 miles to town by ourselves when we were growing up – in today's world that just wouldn't happen.
So you can see her life was like a prism – at times yellow and sunny; red with turmoil; blue with sorrow and but it all came together with contentment at the end. But depending upon what part of her life that you looked at you might come up with an entirely different idea of who she was. She went from being in jail to leading an AA chapter. This teaches us that none of us are absolute sinners, or absolute saints. But our lives are various shades of grey. That even when we sink to the depths we can come back and redeem ourselves the way that she did. I think this is a legacy she would want us to remember.
Lastly, I hope that if there any one out there that is battling addiction of any kind to know that help is out there. There is both AA and NA chapters to help any one who is battling these types of problems. Thank you all for attending.
Postscript:
So after we got to the church the winds were picking up for a front that was coming in. The lights must have flickered 8-10 times in the 2 hours leading up to the service. Heather and I commented that of course it couldn't be a normal day on the day of Mom's Memorial Service. But at the time it started the clouds diminished and you could see the sun shining through the windows. The service went well and we ate afterwards.
We had a fair attendance - around 50 people, about what we anticipated. Mom had not been in Lewisburg for years. Some people did come in from out of town so we particulary thank those who went out of their way to be there. We did get a compliment from the pastor about the grandchildren. They were very well behaved during the service. Not quite as quiet as a church mouse, but not very far off. I remember those days of wrangling youngsters, so compliments to the parents for their efforts.
