My 102 Year Old Mother’s Secrets To Life

My mother, Bonny Maynard, died this week. She was two months shy of 102. So, I’m rounding up to her next birthday.

You would expect a woman her age to be long past the point of participating in life. In fact, you wouldn’t expect a woman to be her age.

But until three weeks ago, my mother was a bundle of sunshine, entertaining the staff at her hospice residence in Ann Arbor, Mich., with stories of her long-ago childhood and youth, as the child of Eastern European immigrants.

We actually thought there might be a chance to take her home, one more time (she had rebounded from a hypertension attack in April that caused her to be hospitalized). Instead, her exit finally came, swiftly, comfortably and without pain.

This week, I gave her eulogy, and I distilled what I could figure out to be her secrets to life. Here is what I said.

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It is an honor to welcome you to this celebration of my mother’s life.
People often asked her the secret to living so long. She would reply, “Chocolate.”

Actually, there are four things that I would like to share today about my mother and her approach to living.

Have faith. She was a relentlessly positive person, fond of saying, “It will all work out.” Behind her faith was a great determination- and a sense of how to get from Point A to Point B. My mother felt anything was possible, if you could figure…