Mom’s funeral service was Monday afternoon. Lily read a little paper Paul wrote when he was in the 1st grade.
My Mother
My mother is nice. She helps me. I like her. I help her too. My mother is clean. She dusts the house. She vacuums the rug. She smells good! She dresses neat. My father loves her. My sisters love her. My brother-in-laws love her. My cousins love her. My uncles and aunts love her. God loves her. She packs my lunch. My mother washes clothes. She washes the dishes.
Then Paul read an excerpt from his master’s thesis, a memoir titled Mapping the Interior: Memories of Africa.
My mother, Gerda Adrianna Johanna van Leeuwen Koning, was born in Zouterwoude, Holland, late in the summer of 1927. She was the sixth and youngest child of Geerlof and Petronella van Leeuwen, a modestly successful dairy-farming couple. As tensions in Europe rose through the 1930s, the family decided that prospects for continued success would be enhanced by a move to the United States. The dairy was sold, a few belongings were packed, and the family embarked upon the trans-Atlantic voyage undertaken by so many before them. The year was 1936.
Never one to be sentimental, my mother made a clean break with her Dutch past. With a zeal typical of the immigrant, she embraced America with her whole being. Although she lived the first nine years of her life in the low country, she tells almost no stories of that time. The only one I can recall as I write is the account of the time she was fishing in the canal behind the dairy and had a fish hook go clean through her thumb, how she bounced along on the handlebars of her brother Gerrit’s bicycle as he took her to the doctor so that he could clip off the barb and pull out the hook. To hear her tell it, my mother’s life began on the S.S. Volendam as the stout ship cut through the cold waves of the Atlantic.
My mother narrates the passage through Ellis Island and the long, cross-country journey by rail to the unknown land of California. She tells of the nice man in a business suit who put her on his knee and taught her the first word of what would become her beloved English: dolly for the soft, cloth doll that was the only toy she brought with her across the ocean. She recounts the establishment of the tiny cash-and-carry dairy in Norwalk and of getting up before dawn to help with the early milking. She remembers being placed in Kindergarten with children three and four years younger than she was until she managed to work her way up to grade-level in spoken English. She tells also of her first teacher, who forced her to choose between Gertrude and Gertie, because no one could pronounce the guttural Gerda. She chose Gertie and did not redeem her proper name until many years later.
Strangely, considering the trauma this un-naming would have caused most people, when her naturalization papers were being processed years later, my mother opted not to retain either of her given middle names. Legally she became simply Gerda van Leeuwen.
“Why?” I always cried out when she recounted this. “How could you just let go of such a link to the past? And not just one, but two names that your parents gave you!”
“What good were they?” She shrugged. “They were just a nuisance to put on forms.” (By the way, I salvaged one of her lost names by naming my daughter Lily Adrianna.)
Ever the pragmatist, my mom. She was stoic and immune to subtleties. She did not get most jokes and did not pretend to. She did not lavish affection even on those closest to her—rather she showed love through unflagging acts of service. She was not given to ornamentation or excess; she was tasteful but spare. Her house was always Dutch clean, and her interior life was as uncluttered as her physical one.
Gerda Koning was a fundamentalist in the purest sense of the word. For her, there were no gray areas in life. God created the heavens and the earth, the Bible is his word written, and Jesus Christ is his word made flesh. That’s all there is to it. Everything she did traced directly back to this. She was untroubled by doubt, and of that I can only be envious.
