Remembering Mo

How I became me

My mother in front of the house where she spent her late teen years in Detroit’s Dexter-Davison neighborhood. Photo @ M. Sillman.

My mother died on December 27. She was 94 years old, so it wasn’t tragic like my dad’s death at age 68, but it was sudden and I’m still sorting through memories and dealing with the fact that my brothers had very different experiences than I did.

The first year of the pandemic, 2020, I produced a radio story for my former employer, tracing how I’d become an arts reporter thanks to my mom. I drew on that for the eulogy I gave at her funeral, and this essay is based on both the radio story and the eulogy.

I spent most of my 40+ years as a journalist producing stories about art and its relationship to building and sustaining community. I have my mother to thank for that continuing passion. I was never a practicing artist, but from an early age I aspired to be a writer, and my evolution as a journalist emerged from the little novels I wrote in books I made from stapled sheets of colored paper.

My mom was a reader, eventually earning a doctorate in English literature. Books were always important to her. In later years when I whined about boredom, she’d recommend reading her favorite book. Who tells a teenager to pick up a copy of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness? My mother! This is how an arts journalist was born.

My mother, center, surrounded by me on the left and my dear friend Vivian Phillips, right. Photo @ Jazmyn Scott.

As her only daughter, I inherited my mother’s hopes for a career of some kind. When she first enrolled at the University of Michigan in the early 1950s, she was given the choice of becoming a teacher or a nurse. She married my father instead in March of 1952. My father was always supportive of everything mom wanted to pursue from a Ph.D. to opening Bookpeople, a store heavy on literature, not a go-to destination for romance or mystery novels. See how Heart of Darkness fits in?

My father bsacked my mom’s aspirations, but was not so happy to attend the operas, symphonies or museum exhibits she loved. By default, I accompanied her to the Masonic Temple in Detroit, where I savored many first acts from the traveling performances by New York’s Metropolitan Opera. I always fell asleep during Act II but would wake up for a rousing finale. I liked the ballet much more (and still do). I have memories of seeing Margot Fonteyn and Rudolf Nureyev. She was old; he was amazing.

My mom was smart, loyal, stubborn and unfiltered in expressing her opinions. On the upside, there was no passive aggression. You always knew where you stood. She and her dear cousin Marilyn always encouraged me to follow my dreams, even when those dreams didn’t lead to the expected MRS degree.

My mother on the right with her friend Beverly Talan. My son is in the back, right. This photo was taken by my uncle Howard Shapiro at my mother’s 90th birthday celebration.

My mother wasn’t sporty or outdoorsy; she once told me she didn’t raise me to sleep on the ground. So I wasn’t much of a camper. She was a fan of Julia Child and tried to convince us that chicken breasts with a wine reduction sauce were delicious. We were just young kids, and we didn’t go with the program then, although I now agree.

She and my dad were also liver fans, and I remember the cooking stench driving me out of the house. Must have been an acquired taste but none of us picked it up.

Her culinary career continued on a more palatable note as a cookie baker until she died. As I write this I’m looking at her final batch of cookies. Chocolate chocolate chip.

My mom and dad were married for 33 years before she was widowed in 1995. She wasn’t someone to sit around. She tried out various careers before taking up photography after she moved to Royal Oak, a suburb of Detroit. She took her camera on a trip to Italy with me for her 75th birthday. She didn’t always pay attention to where she was walking, and I remember when she fell and damaged that camera, along with her face. It was one of many times she fell over the years. As she aged her hands grew more unsteady and eventually she had to put her camera aside.

Maurine lived a long, full life. And she always lived it her way.

Even at the age of 94 she wouldn’t admit she was old. We knew her time was finite, but her death still came as a blow to us and to many of her friends. Aside from my physical existence, I owe her my perpetual fascination with the creative world and my ongoing conviction that the arts, especially live performance, exist to help connect us to each other and to a universal realm that we share.

This is Blair, my mother’s fourth great-grandchild, born 12/31/2025.

As I said, my mother died on December 27. Her fourth great-grandchild was born on December 31. The circle of life always amazes me. The old makes way for something new. She would have been overjoyed to welcome this baby.