Tuesday, March 3, 2020
Remembrance
From Eric, for my mom Leila Rae Smith (Simon)
May 7, 1928 – March 1, 2020
As we remember Leila, I think we can all agree that she left this place better than she found it.
She also found the positive in every situation. She cared about the well-being of each, without the slightest judgment, whether she understood their situation or not.
She was always fully committed whether at work, in community, or just with family and friends.
For me personally, one thing she helped me with is writing. That is a real life skill. Business writing specifically. In my formative years she offered countless hours of editing and training for effective written communication. Getting rid of extraneous words. Getting to the point. Backing up claims with facts and references. Talking to the reader. Simple sentence structure. And even breaking the rules for style.
She also modeled professional dedication and persistence. Dedication and persistence can overcome both internal and external obstacles. I’m not the smartest one on the block. But through dedication and persistence I built a successful practice and a stable life.
Mom showed me that no matter what you do, you can be of service. In her case, just a community college associate professor, but she was deeply committed to improving her student’s lives. And did so with literally thousands of students over the years by helping them improve themselves.
Leila might have forgotten many things in her later years, but one thing she never truly forgot, was her humble beginnings. She was raised by her single-mother Rose, her Uncle Jack, and stepfather, Frank, all packed into a simple walk-up tenement in the Bronx borough of New York City 1930s. It was full of Eastern European Jewish and Italian Catholic immigrants.
She never forgot that it was the immigrants that built this country. She never forgot that the lesser among us deserve both dignity and a chance. It was that latter value that led her to a career of teaching secretarial sciences, mainly to people of color, or little means, at community colleges. It was those students that would later bring their families also out of poverty, and be able to send their kids to school. She knew about “pay it forward” before the book and movie came out.
Rather than find faults, she saw the good in each person she came across.
If you mentioned you had a cold, her response was, "the good thing about that, is that you are going to get better." Unfortunately, I couldn't tell her the same thing about Alzheimer’s—which is irreversible and keeps getting worse unit it kills you.
She was an innovator and leader in modern teaching approaches. In the '70s, she studied emerging theories about positive thinking and proceeded to integrate that in her classrooms at LA Harbor Community College, in her textbook English For Careers, and even at home with me and Roberta.
In the middle stage of Alzheimer's, this positive thinking habit apparently still ran so deep, that she just could not see or acknowledge her condition or Dad's condition when he had Lewy Body Disease.
After it was obvious that her short-term memory ability had failed, Dad once commented, “Mom’s main comfort zone was academia, intellect, words. Alzheimer's and memory loss was the worst disease that she could be hit with.”
It was a slow decline, a slow process of subtraction, as we lost her one brain cell, one synapse at a time. No new memories forming, reading the same story over and over again in the LA Times, each time, the first. Not remembering whether she’d eaten breakfast, five minutes later.
Every time we had a chat via Skype, it was brand new and amazing to her—that we could have a video call. She loved our visits, our conversations, just to talk. She was the type of person who began missing you even before you left.
I’ve been missing her for over 10 years, since middle stage of the disease when she began to cognitively hollow out.
Now she is in our memories, and she had the gift of this one, amazing life that we each get but once.
