In the end, we'll all become stories.

It's a quote by a Canadian author, Margaret Atwood, that I have felt echo this week, in the dozens of stories about Mom we've passed around. Storytelling is a natural response to grief, a ritual against loss we've been honing for thousands of years. Tell this tale, and you'll remember the people. Remember when, and you won't forget the who.

We exist as moments when we're alive. In the brief personal moments when we make choices, become memories, and therefore escape time all together. It's the memory of those moments, and the stories within them, where we live without end.

So.

It's like this. When I realized my mother was dying, I reached for stories. I looked for poems that could possibly express the wonderful, complicated, singular experience of Mom's life, and the person I knew.

I looked for an essay with words in the shape of the empty space she leaves behind. For wisdom that tells me what to do with this deeply human experience of grief, which is one part sorrow, and gratitude and regret and relief and loss. I looked for the literary balm which would…would smell like the Estee Lauder perfume mom wore and feel like butter brickle ice cream, enjoyed after a summer sunset, listening to MASH on the television and the creak of a recliner. I looked for words that would feel sound like june bugs, crowding a window screen. Like the click of rummikub tiles under Mom's manicured nails.

Emily Dickenson and Wordsworth failed me. Church hymns were not quite right. No one else's stories expressed the watercolor spectrum, both muddled and vibrant, of mom's life. It felt like an injustice, failing a Mom who put so much faith in her daughter's words. In search for words to draw the lines in the constellation of my mother's galaxy, and am left with this:

The story of my mom's death is simple and elegant: she lived, she grew old, and she fell asleep holding the hand of the man she loved.

Yet the story of my mom's life is complex, vast and fiercely beautiful.

So, again. Where do I start?

Maybe you expect me to tell you stories of Mary Ann Linder as a mother. And I could. It feels selfish to spend time on that when describing the fullness of her life, but I know that story was one of her favorites.

She was an intensely curious, intelligent person, who was determined to pass that on to her children. Our middle class household struggled at times, but it was always, always, filled with a wealth of books, encyclopedias, documentaries, historical movies, piles of homework at the kitchen counter. Mom had a love for music and a stunning singing voice. I could tell the story of accompanying her to countless concineers rehearsals, napping in the church coat room as I heard Mom's voice drift down the hallway. Putting on the Ritz. Moon River. Secondhand Rose. Classics.

There are stories, with dirt under the nails, of Mom as a hard worker. When money grew tight, she maintained a meticulous budget in beautiful longhand in the checkbook. And when it grew tighter still, she didn't make a fuss. She quietly took medical transcription courses at night, then work at transcribing the tapes and recordings of doctors, work that paid for dance classes, summer camps, any opportunity for her children.

I could share the lesser told story of how Mom was a fighter. The fates saw fit to grant her three children that came from the factory with the default settings stuck at hard mode. She hated conflict, but for her children, she would fight. went up against schools, against doctors, against the world itself, until it had to bow before her and make space for her children's needs. Whether it was Dan's appendix, or Kate's performances, or my--....well, let's just say as the youngest child, it was good mom already had a lot of battle experience.

Whatever it was, Mom would not relent, would not let the world diminish her children's shine.

Maybe many of you are here today for the role you played in Mom's story of service. These are stories she insisted be told at a whisper. Stories she would tiptoe through. You'd have to listen close to hear how she fed neighborhood gatherings and directed the contained chaos of a church kids camp. How she housed struggling family in their times of need, adopted everyone’s school friends, and mothered an entire girl scout troop. It's become more of a legend in our family how mom, along with three other church ladies of similar heroic vigor, single-handedly populated the entire Juanita methodist cookbook the year I was born. Though quiet, I think these were some of the happiest moments of my mom's life.

Or maybe you know my Mom's favorite love story: her first and last boyfriend, the man she married. Mom loved Dad, quietly, fiercely, immovably. She used to take pride that none of her children ever saw them fight, but I think what is more impressive is that we never saw them hesitate to reach out for each other, hand in hand. A story that held true to the closing chapter.

What is the constant--the type set, the font face, the very ink of my mom's stories--is the presence of love. The work of love she chose, again and again.

Mom made us, everyone in this room, her life work. Can I tell you a secret?

(Shh, no listening here, mom.)

I hated those Giltner family reunions when I was a kid.

At least, I hated getting ready for it, because Mom fussed over what I wore, how I looked, who would be there and what we would bring and whether we would be on time. As a teenager, I hated it because I thought it was silly, but I was wrong. Mom cared about the details of that family reunion not because she had anything to prove, but because family was everything to her. She loved everyone in this room so much that the reunion was the highlight of her year. She'd be the first to arrive, setting up hotdishes and marshalling us into a folding chair brigade, and she'd be the last to leave, wiping down tables and wielding tinfoil and tupperware like a weapon. She bloomed at reunions, lighting up, beaming, soaking in the presence of her people, her community, her family.

In the end, we all become stories of what we love.

And these stories stack up, no beginning, no end, until you have a life. These stories. These moments that escape time and death.

The moment Mom will live on in, for me, was when the sky split open and the rain poured down.

We were in Madison, Wisconsin, where I was speaking at a conference shortly after college. Mom, in a rare adventure without dad at her side, had come along to keep me company on the long drive. It was a conference on technology, and Mom was happy to stay out of the way, as I put on my ‘professor’ suit and pretended I was more adult than I felt.

On the last evening, we decided to celebrate in the way Mom loved best: good food at a fancy restaurant. We made reservations at one that was a few blocks down the street from our hotel. A bit of a walk, but doable in the mild June heat. We dressed up and set out.

It was after dusk, so most of the little shops we passed were closed. We were halfway down the street when the sky split open and the rain came down--in buckets. It was not merely just raining, it was torrenting down. I shrieked and we skittered to the sanctuary of the nearest awning, but not before we were drenched to the bone.

The awning was more of a ledge above a locked door, and it was only as I was attempting--and failing--to wring water from my skirt that I realized the real predicament.

Anyone who knew my mom knew that, despite growing up on a farm, she preferred to stay sensibly indoors. Where it was neither too hot nor too cold and especially where her curled hair would not get mussed. Mom was known to carry around a little plastic bonnet in her purse which she would deploy at the slightest hint of wind.

But that wasn't the mother I saw when I finally looked up. In that rain, Mom was transformed. She was giggling, flush-cheeked, with a bright glint in her eye that would have been more familiar in an impish kid than in my stalwart, proper mother. Rain had plastered all the curls to her head but she was laughing. Bright and clear and more spirited than the rain.

"Want to run?" she said, and suddenly I knew I was seeing through time. To a younger woman who had the audacity to herd cows, with the confidence to laugh without a worry, a woman who knew that every storm runs out of rain eventually, and that the cold could ever only be skin deep. The version of my mom as a young girl, a version I'd never gotten to see but was still there. "Want to run?" this woman said.

I could not answer for a moment because No! my heart said, no, I don't want to run and break this spell, to leave this moment that's summoned us. I wanted to stay under that awning and hold her tight, this woman who raised me, who contained so much strength I often couldn't see.

But that's not the way time works, and no one tells a story by standing still. I grasped her hand and we ran, cold and giggling, soaked in rain and stories.

We reached the restaurant, which was empty, and the staff, which were kind, and the food, which I can only imagine was good. Because I don't remember a single detail of the fancy meal that night. But I remember the surprise and pleasure of my mom's bright laugh, I remember the warmth of her hand, as we walked, undaunted, through the rain.

That's the moment my mom will live in forever, for me. Laughing, fearless, made more beautiful by the storm.

In the end, we'll all become stories.