January 11, 2024

Re: A Eulogy for My Mom

My Mom CONNIE BALDWIN BARNETT (1945-2024) passed away a week ago this Saturday. Her funeral was held January 10, 2024 at Trinity United Methodist Church in Homewood, Alabama, and she was buried at Elmwood Cemetery in Birmingham. I wrote the first third of this eulogy in the initial hours after her death—and then put it off for a couple of days. But I woke up early yesterday morning and, with a few cups of coffee and more than a few tears, managed to get it done. I’ve decided to post it here as a sincere, if inadequate, tribute to her life and legacy. She will be sorely missed.

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My Mom hated Donald Trump—I mean, despised him. When we were living in Philadelphia, I would call her on my nightly drives to Steelyard Sports—a massive, warehouse-type structure where two of my boys would practice baseball—and sometimes I would cringe before tapping the “Connie Barnett” tab on my phone. The drive took about 45 minutes, if I left my office at Villanova University, swung by Steelyard, and then took the serpentine Conshohocken State Road back home. But, in any case, I knew…just knew!…that 97% of our conversation would be about Trump. How to respond? I myself am not a “Trump guy,” but I’m also a political agnostic—a registered “Independent” and unregistered skeptic, who would just as soon return to a medieval theocracy than to reelect Trump or Biden. So, when my Mom would tell me about a story she saw on CNN or on MSNBC, I felt obliged to say, “But Mom, have you considered…”. She would have none of it: “Christopher, the man is just sooooo arrogant. So, so arrogant.” She had me there.

My Mom died on January 6th. I could expound on this irony, but sometimes the jokes write themselves, right? Still, it does give me pause: why did my Mom hate Trump so much? I don’t think her antipathy was necessarily policy-driven. No, at bottom, I think it had to do with Trump’s arrogance, his proud influence and privilege. Love him or hate him, no one could dispute that Donald Trump is wealthy and powerful—an emblem of swaggering masculinity. By way of contrast, my Mom’s favorite saying was “Pride goeth before a fall.”

Technically, this expression is a merger of two lines, which together comprise Proverbs 16:18: “Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall.” But, in any case, my Mom never tired of repeating the abbreviated version of this ancient wisdom. Indeed, for my Mom, nothing in life was more certain than “Pride goeth before a fall.” I don’t know if [my younger sister] JoAnna would agree—though I suspect she would—but my Mom had an almost subconscious aversion to compliments. If you ever wanted to run a Freudian analysis of my own psychological makeup, you could probably start there. My Mom rarely gave compliments. I know where this reluctance came from. I know it as surely as I know my own name or what month it is. Proverbs 16:18. “Pride goeth before a fall.” For her, the biggest mistake one can make in life is to get cocky, complacent, haughty.

You see, my Mom had a brutal and, frankly, unfair understanding of life’s fragility. First, she contracted polio as a toddler. As the story has come down to me, a number of kids on her childhood street—Warrington Road in Mountain Brook, Alabama—also caught the virus and were killed. Of course, she survived, though it took several surgeries and years of corrective braces to help her walk again. Things were more or less normal for several years after that—always the Southern belle, Connie was named “Most Courteous” at Shades Valley High School in 1963—but then tragedy struck. Her older sister Mary Jo Baldwin was killed by a drunk driver near Columbus, Georgia in June 1967. Mary Jo’s death devastated the Baldwin family. This was suburban Birmingham in the 1960s: such afflictions were not to be discussed in polite society. My grandmother Frances fell into a dark yet silent depression, while my grandfather Percy, ever my Mom’s hero, tried to keep things afloat. He was more or less successful. My Mom decided on a career in special education. She attended Brenau College (now Brenau University) in Gainesville, Georgia and afterwards lived in Atlanta for a while. Indeed, if the myths and legends are true, she loved to have a good time. Eventually she took a teaching position in northern Alabama, not far from NASA’s Space Flight Center in Huntsville. It was there that she met my father Don Barnett, who was an aeronautics engineer with NASA.

Looking back, my Mom always described her initial impression of my Dad in romantic terms: he was several years older than her, a man of experience, born in Cleveland and raised in Kentucky, who wore a camel blazer, sported unkempt hair, and smoked cigarettes during parent-teacher meetings—a kind of Rod-Steiger-meets-Gordon-Lightfoot vibe. Amazingly, he had already been through more hardship than her. Orphaned as an infant, he was brought up by his loving but unstable grandmother in Lexington. He married young—and divorced young—but not before having four children of his own. His second son from this marriage, Steve Barnett, suffered from Muscular Dystrophy—a cruel and miserable disease that drove a wedge between him and his first wife. And so when my Dad and my Mom first met, he was a single father caring for a boy with special needs. No wonder Connie fell for him! “Pride goeth before a fall.”

It’s here that the story should have taken a comic turn, much like the romcoms that my Mom always loved. My parents should’ve settled down and lived “happily ever after.” But life came at them hard. Even as my dad’s career was taking off—he chaired the engineering department at UAB in the late 1970s and early 1980s—tragedy continued to strike. First, my Mom’s beloved Percy passed away in March 1982. Then my dad’s oldest son Mike died in a car accident in January 1983. Around the same time, my dad learned that he had esophageal cancer, and, after an excruciating illness, he died in April 1983. At last, Steve succumbed to Muscular Dystrophy in February 1985. In a shockingly short span of time, my Mom went from being a happily married woman, a parent of two young and bright-eyed children, who owned a respectable, if not elegant, home in Homewood to being a widow, a parent of two fatherless children, who held a mortgage she could barely afford. She was the ultimate underdog. The cripple. The single mother. The bereaved.

All of which brings me back to: “Pride goeth before a fall.” A scholar might parse this passage in a number of ways. It is, after all, a running theme throughout the Bible. In fact, the idea appears more than once in Proverbs 16 alone: “Every one that is proud in heart is an abomination to the Lord,” reads Proverbs 16:5. Later, in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus returns to this notion, albeit in a positive vein: “Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” One commentator sums up this issue as follows: “The Lord has little tolerance for the proud. Thus proper humility is a matter…of godly wisdom. It is the only realistic posture in a world that we do not control.”

Yes, this is what my Mom knew well, all too well. The world is often inequitable and always unpredictable. Better watch your step. If this is not a comforting thought, it does at least stoke a type of existential awareness—a sense that life is delicate and must not be taken for granted. Indeed, as my Mom saw it, one can only ignore this wisdom for a time. The truth will out, if not now then later. She would often reference this logic in relation to obstacles I faced. “Look Christopher,” she would tell me in her measured Southern drawl, “it may look like the other boys have it made. But not having a father around does give you one advantage: you’ll have to earn everything.” This was painful to hear as a teenager, but I’m sure it helped me in innumerable ways. JoAnna barely talked to me in high school, but I’m sure she felt the same way. No kid wants to be told that the world is unjust, but there is a kind of liberation in assuming that you’ll have to work for things. “Pride goeth before a fall.”

To be clear, however, my Mom was no stoic. She was passionate and sometimes furious—a bona fide recipient of the “ol’ Baldwin temper,” as she liked to put it. About twenty years ago, when my wife Stacy and I were newlyweds living in Chicago, my Mom drove up to see us. It was a memorable visit in a number of ways. For one thing, it was the first time that I noticed her mobility was in significant decline; it may have been the first time she noticed it as well. One night, the three of us had dinner reservations in the Loop, but my Mom grew despondent when she couldn’t make the walk from the parking garage to the restaurant. We were about halfway there when she went into a fit, rebuking the Windy City for not having enough “handicap parking” and yelling at me when I offered to call a cab. I think we ended up ordering pizza.

This issue would resurface again a few days later, this time in hilarious fashion. Our apartment building on the North Side came with a single parking spot. So, during her stay, Stacy and I obviously allowed Mom to use our allotted spot while we parked on the street. But one morning we awoke to learn that her car—yes, a hideously blue Chrysler PT Cruiser, which stuck out like a turd in a fruit bowl—had been towed. After making some calls, we tracked the car to a towing company a few miles away. We drove over, and intially my Mom tried to sweet talk the attendant, using her slowest and most refined Southern accent. He was unmoved. She then explained that she had polio as a child and that her “handicap tag” was, in fact, prominently displayed on her dashboard. He remained unmoved, pointing out that she was towed in accordance with the policy of the apartment building. This guy was mustachioed and steely-eyed; he looked like one of the cops from The Fugitive. So, my Mom paid the fine—indeed, she insisted—and then doddered over to her PT Cruiser, got in, and slammed the door. I knew she was mad, but I had no idea what was about to happen. As she pulled away, she rolled down her window and got the attendant’s attention. There was a pause, and then my Mom inexplicably called out, “The South will rise again!”

Over the years, I reminded my Mom of this story, particularly when she went into a long discourse about Trump’s popularity in the South. She would retort—fairly, of course—that being from the South doesn’t mean that you support this or that candidate. But there was a deeper point here as well. As I reflect more on this issue, I think it’s fair to say that my Mom’s “Southernness” was inseparable from her own status as an underdog. She loved to tell stories about her childhood visits to the lonely town of Cuthbert, Georgia, where my grandfather was born and raised. Similarly, her favorite vacation spots were offbeat Southern haunts—Cherokee, North Carolina; Ft. Walton Beach, Florida; the French Quarter in New Orleans. She even used her predilection for underdogs to justify a midlife coversion to being an Auburn fan. “Christopher,” she would say, “Alabama just wins too much.”

So, what can we learn from Connie’s life? Ultimately, I don’t think the lesson is political, and I’m sure it doesn’t come down to which team to root for. No, I think her legacy lies in her unflinching desire to make the most of what God has given you and to never forget the underdog—the cripple, the widow, the bereaved. “Pride goeth before a fall.” My Mom’s whole life was a testimony to this perennial wisdom. She wasn’t perfect, and these last eighteen months have been incredibly difficult. Still, I daresay that very few people—yes, very few people—have had a more profound understanding of how delicate life is and of how much we need to treasure it.

We love you, Mom. May your memory be eternal!