Mother enjoyed keeping notes. She’d jot down recipes, make memos to herself, and keep lists. For a woman with five children, an active husband, and a full schedule of her own as a social worker and guardian ad litem, keeping notes was an essential strategy for staying on track.

In addition to the functional memos she kept for herself, Mother also scribbled down snippets of things that impressed her: a line from a sermon, an aphorism from a book, or a philosophical statement gleaned from a newspaper article.

On one scrap of paper you might find: “Alan Segal: ‘The best true person of faith lives in a state of holy insecurity’.”

Or on another : “Heaven is a place where people have no secrets, where there is complete understanding and people can be themselves—Emanuel Swedenborg, born in Sweden in 1688, Scientist and Theologian.”

Mother did not keep her notes in tidy journals or notebooks. She’d grab whatever was available and write as the mood took her.

I have found her jottings on the backs of envelops, the backs of old court rulings, even written in the margins of bulletins for Pullen Memorial Baptist Church.

Occasionally when straightening out a drawer of random items, I’ll come across something she’s written, and I’ll feel a rush of warmth seeing her distinctive handwriting.

She embroidered my name on the Christmas stocking she made for me one year. Compared to the stockings my siblings have (which they bought later) my stocking is scrawny and refuses to hold many treats.

But to see the trace of my mother’s hand is more precious than any trinket.

Daddy’s hand was rangy and often cryptic. Mother wrote in clear, careful letters.

The notes that impressed me the most, were the ones she took in preparation for writing the sequel to her memoir.

Mother intended to continue her story [she’d already completed a memoir earlier that had taken her life up to 1944, “In Search of our Roots”].

Louise Copeland’s memoir

She began drafting “A Woman’s Pilgrimage Through the Twentieth Century.”

True to her frugal ways, she typed her initial draft on the back of scrap paper. In this case, she wrote on the other side of old page proofs from several of my father’s books.

Those double-sided pages seemed to speak of my parents’ lives.

Both had a story to tell and a life to live as individuals, but they inhabited the same space, sharing the page.

Since my father published his works, and my mother’s sequel was as yet not, I suppose you could read the page along the usual binaristic lines.

My father’s sphere was public and primary, my mother’s personal and secondary.

I prefer to see it differently. My mother’s story, on the back of my father’s page, spoke to her strength. She was always there—at his back, his support, his backbone. And she had a story of her own that she allowed to merge with my father’s.

Mother with Father

My mother was an amazing woman. She grew up in an era when women were not allowed the same opportunities as men. I remember she told me that one of her earliest jobs was as a school teacher, but when the principal learned she was pregnant with her first child, she was forced to resign.

Women were expected to accept auxiliary roles. As mother would write in her unpublished memoirs: “I went into marriage believing that my own needs and desires must be submerged…that I must live through my husband and the children I hoped to have. This was what was expected of Christian wives in the 30s and 40s.”

Mother was true to expectation on many levels. She was modest and quiet and always willing to put others first.

Still, she never gave up on growing. She never stopped cultivating her own strengths and refining her own story. She continued to work on being the best wife, the best mother, and the best Christian she could be—within the margins of her side of the page.

Louise Copeland

When I mentioned my mother to my friend, Nancy, she told me that in the Jewish faith Moses is often held up as a model. When one dies and meets God they expect to be asked—Why have you not been as good as Moses? When in fact, God wants to know, why have you not been as good as the person you were meant to be?

Mother never stopped trying to be the best Louise she could be. And she set an excellent example for her children and for all those who came in contact with her.