Lisa's Eulogy Reflections on her Mom, Nancy Washington

Nancy Washington 
February 10, 1929 -- March 17, 2025

“I choose purple and green!” I felt downright giddy as I announced this at the dinner table, at age 8 or so. “And I choose blue and gold!” my older sister Ruth chimed in, equally exuberantly. These sentences were in answer to my mom’s offer to paint our bedrooms in any two colors we chose. She may have had something more subtle in mind, but she stuck to her promise.
This feels emblematic of my mom—her eagerness to make everything a team sport, her willingness to relinquish control and trust people, and her enjoyment of the unconventional and the colorful. I didn’t know how unusual this was until later. I had never really thought about the fact that our backyard was the place all the kids naturally landed after school, until one kid pointed it out. He said it was because, “Your mom lets us have fun. Our parents are worried about us making a mess, but your mom likes mess! She listens to us like we’re real people. She bakes us cookies and teaches us games and turns on the sprinkler for us to run through.” That side of her was out in full force at the Halloween party where she stuffed herself inside a fold-out ladder and had my dad drape it with sheets, so she could turn on a flashlight and shout “Boo!” as each child came up the driveway.
She loved to host parties for adults, too, even though she was not, truth be told, a great housekeeper or cook. It didn’t matter. I remember the handmade signs she and my dad made inviting international students at San Jose State to come over for Thanksgiving dinner, and the motley groups that gathered around our ping pong table. It wasn’t about the food; it was about friendship and the wide-open table.
It was also about the laughter. I remember the fancy molded Jello salad that hadn’t set quite enough by the time everything else was ready at a dinner party. As she and two of her friends were trying to get it onto a platter, the operation went south, and somehow it slid right into the kitchen sink. Instead of this upsetting them, they threw back their heads and roared with laughter as it shimmied down the drain! I distinctly remember looking up at their faces with a mix of disbelief and fascinated attraction—I couldn’t understand why they weren’t devastated. But I longed for that kind of freedom to fail, to let go of what one had hoped for and to simply delight in what is. To find humor in any situation, and to do life with dear friends at one’s side. These were life skills that served my mom well as she weathered many challenges.
My mom was quiet, but she was so brave. I remember her saying, as we faced the large waves of Santa Cruz, CA, “The ocean is your friend. You don’t need to fear it. If you get caught in a wave, just relax and think of it like a trip through the washing machine. You’ll come out alright in the end.”    This had in some ways been her life experience. Her childhood had been really hard, with a father who was both physically and verbally abusive.  But by the grace of God and sheer pluck, she came out more than alright in the end.
I think that’s why the story of Emily the Cow resonated so deeply that she specifically requested it be told at her memorial service. Emily was a cow headed to slaughter in Massachusetts in 1995. The workers were on their lunch break, so Emily saw her moment to break free. She got a running start and leapt in all her bovine glory over a 5-foot-tall fence and ran deep into the forest, where she evaded capture for six weeks, until a farming family bought her from the slaughterhouse and let her live out a happy life in their meadow.
I think my mom’s leap out of destructive mess of her childhood home came in stages and through surprising choices—the unlikely choice to spend a summer during college serving Mexican children in a migrant camp with her church young adults group. Or the bold choice to buy a used but sporty Studebaker Coupe convertible while she was a single woman working in San Francisco after college and go charging up and down the hills of the city in it with her friends. The choice to see a very quirky man, with epilepsy and mild autism and the odd name of George Washington, and say, “Now there’s a man with a heart of gold. He’s the one for me.” They leapt together out of the hardships of their childhoods by the grace of God, into adult lives that were brighter and more colorful. She and my dad followed Jesus together joyfully and wholeheartedly.  
The world of careers was frustrating and disappointing for her. She worked after college for the Methodist publishing house, work she genuinely enjoyed, and then later teaching English as a Second Language and as a popular substitute teacher in elementary schools. But her primary vocation as of 1960 was lavishing care upon a child with disabilities, my sister Ruth, advocating tirelessly for her full inclusion in schools well before that was common, and watching in amusement as Ruth introduced herself to literally every person in the grocery store, to the chagrin of her more introverted sister! My mom didn’t have a career, but she had a vocation, which she lived out faithfully and well.
She was also an eager supporter of my vocation from a young age. I remember the time I was about ten or eleven and in wide-eyed wonder after having stayed in the adult service at church for the first time. The pastor had preached a rather mediocre sermon, though I was not discerning enough yet to know that. I asked, “Could I do that someday?” Her response: “Probably a lot better than he just did!” She marched me on up to him and had me ask him how one becomes a pastor. His rather uninspired reply was, “Uh, well, you go to seminary.” She fulminated to my dad all the way home that he’d missed a chance to talk with me about becoming a leader who loves people and cultivating my love of Scripture. I love this story because it shows her quick wit, something so many friends and relatives have commented on, which stayed with her even to her final week, and it shows that she took faith and ministry seriously, from her own work as an elder to her deep gratitude to those who pastored her well in her final years.
Her willingness to risk and trust God took her life on a surprising twist near its end. Becca shared about that, but I want to add one more thing she said about it.  When Rich and I began pondering a missional venture back in 2019, she said, “I don’t want you waiting around for me to die before you say yes to God’s calling. Make your plans to go and something will work out for me.”
Little did she know how warmly the amazing church community of Emmaus Way would welcome her. But this past spring it became clear that the arrangement with her facility was no longer working, and we needed to make changes quickly. That was when a friend of ours and of Triangle Grace church raised the possibility of us living here, in a home that has been a forested haven of peace for my mom’s final months, and with kindness from many here as well. We are so grateful to both church communities.
My mom had some strikingly vivid dreams toward the end of her life. Last year, she dreamed that my sister, who died in 2016 and had never driven a car, pulled up in a car and drove her around, with my dad in the backseat. They were excited to give her a tour of a stunning new place, with mountains like nothing she’d seen in their beauty and vastness and the intensity of their colors. Truly a foretaste of heaven. I like to think that the skies, trees, flowers, and mountain ranges she saw were filled with vivid colors…colors like purple and green, and blue and gold—like the colors she so generously gave to us.