Remarks at the Celebration of Life for Else Bolotin Lexington, Ky., Sept. 20, 2015 Glenn Kessler

I have to admit, it took me a while to understand how unusual our mother was. It took even longer for me to fully appreciate her.

Once, her children found a wallet in a park containing marijuana cigarettes. Even in the early 1970s, there probably weren’t many mothers who would open up the joints to show us the seeds. Of course we then wanted to plant the seeds, so she said okay, it’s probably a good idea to know what what marijuana plants looked like. As I recall, the plants grew pretty tall.

And there probably were not many moms who would have expressed concern over the fact that I, as a teenager, was not cursing enough. She felt it was a serious deficiency on my part and openly pushed me to call her epithets when I was angry. “Glenn, You’re mad at me,” she say. “Call me a shit.”

She let us give our beautiful long-haired Persian cat the unusual name of “Cocaine.” Marc had watched a TV show in which the drug was featured and said the kitten was as white as cocaine. I think most parents would have immediately rejected this suggestion but mom said it was fine.

She even let us choose the colors of our bedrooms. My room had garish Day-Glo yellow walls and black trim, Marc choose pink and purple and Sylvia’s room was done in orange. The colors seem vaguely ridiculous now but I recall at the time being immensely proud of how my room looked.

If there’s a common theme, it’s that she was open to our ideas, no matter how strange, and she was willing to let us find our own way, even if it took us in unusual directions.

In her memoir, Mom writes that her father used to say that she had three freedoms—the freedom to marry who she wanted, the freedom to choose her career and the freedom to choose her religion. In retrospect, those were pretty enlightened sentiments for a father to tell his daughter in the 1930s. “I felt I was mistress of my own destiny,” she wrote.

Mom certainly gave us a lot of rope. Of course, she was also a single mother for part of our upbringing, quite distracted with having to complete her Ph.D. dissertation, so maybe some of her laissez-faire attitude was by happenstance, not design.

But at the same time, she was always open to new things. She wanted to be on the cutting edge. At 88, as many as you know, she was quite active on Facebook. She even signed up for Twitter. She followed about 50 people, mostly Democrats, and even tweeted on occasion. I thought this tweet from 2013 was amusing:

“Thanks @SpeakerBoehner for passing a long-term budget. Keep standing up to the extreme voices in the House.”

Here’s another example of how mom always loved to embrace the latest fad.

When I was in 3rd grade, I recall my classmates were so amazed one day when I showed up wearing bellbottom pants. They gathered around me excitedly, saying they had begged their parents for

bellbottoms and had been refused. What had I done to convince my mother to buy them?

I had to sheepishly admit that I had no idea what kind of pants these were, that my mother had bought these for me on her own. But I was really happy to be so cool.

As you know, mom emigrated to the United States with our father in 1954. By her account, she was the instigator. She was eager to get away from a war-torn country and the horrible memories of the Nazi occupation.

She had already spent a year overseas after the war living in Canada, and it was on the ship returning to Holland that she met a man who would become a lifelong friend—Bob Gross. He later became dean of the engineering school at Columbia University and years later a neighbor of mom and Dave in Chapel Hill. At the time, though, he was traveling to Europe to help rescue family members in the aftermath of World War 2.

Bob sent me a note recalling that encounter some 65 years ago, part of which I would like to read. It’s a wonderful account of that moment in time—and of how easily our mother made friends.

Traveling alone, I quickly met a group of young people, including a beautiful, vivacious, energetic, and intelligent young woman -- Else Houwink. She befriended me and helped to introduce me not only to others traveling on the Veendam -- including a wonderful collection of American and European kids our age -- but also to a life very different than my own upbringing.

During the voyage, Else talked about her experiences living in Holland during the war and, not to put too fine a point on it, she felt -- at that time -- nothing but hatred for the Germans. Even then, Else had strong political views.

Bob wrote that when he returned to Holland after his two-month tour across Europe, “she was planning to attend Leiden University and then travel to America.” They spent ten days together and he even snuck her on board his ship home for a last lunch together.

As I had hoped when I last saw Else in Holland, it was not the last time I would see her. To the contrary, we kept in close touch over the years and she, together with her husbands and my wife Elee, forged a lifelong bond. I miss Else very much, but she lives on in all of our hearts.

Note that Bob writes that when he returned after two months, our mother was already planning to attend university and then live in the United States. This is long before she met our father.

In fact, this weekend we were looking at her diary from this period. Most of it was in Dutch but at one point she writes in English about her desperate wish to move to America. She wrote that she was boring her parents to death with the subject but had turned to the diary because she couldn't stop thinking about it, including her longing for hamburgers and hot dogs.

At Leiden University, mom joined a “jaarclub,” a kind of sorority. As Wicky, one of the few surviving members wrote me, “We were 15 young girls with nice ideas to make a better world after the dark years of the World War in Holland with the sound of German boots and fear, threat, hunger, misery.” Another member of the Jaarclub,

Annelies—who was later a bridesmaid at our parents’ wedding—recalled that it was as if Mom had come from another planet. Everyone else was in wartime outfits. But mom, “she was about three years older than most of us in our Jaarclub, a very sophisticated person, dressed a la mode and with nylon stockings!!”

These women have continued to meet, almost on an annual basis, and mom was an active participant up until her death. “She always was — as when a student — enthusiastic, positive, inspiring, humorous, with a rich source of bright tales,” Wicky said.

Mom hadn’t graduated from college when she moved to the United States with our father, who had been hired by Proctor & Gamble as a chemical engineer. Yet years later, when she decided to get her Ph.D. in psychology, she figured out how to game the system.

It’s kind of an amazing story. She started taking courses at the University of Cincinnati when she was about 40 years old and everyone assumed she was a graduate student.

Mom, being mom, did little to dissuade such impressions. She kind of had one foot in the graduate department while taking the necessary courses to complete her BA.

Eventually, when it came time to meet the Physical Education requirement, she somehow had a friend of a friend make a connection with the college dean and she went in to see him. No surprise, she charmed him and the dean waived some of the requirements, including the dreaded PE class. Meanwhile, the folks in the graduate department were none the wiser.

After our parents divorced, mom became pretty indignant about how single women were treated in those days. She had trouble getting credit because she was no longer attached to a man. It helped inspire her to set up a practice, with Allie Hendricks, called “Women Inc.— Institute for Social Change,” to help women cope with a male-dominated world.

When our mother remarried and we moved to Lexington with Dave Bolotin, I was by then a high school student and couldn’t wait get away from home. I’m afraid to say that I probably wasn’t particularly kind to her. She tell me something and I would sneer, “I know that.” Or I would tell her something and sneer, “You didn’t know that?”

But mom kept plugging away at maintaining the relationship. She had this knack for trying to find a connection, even though my phone manners are generally regarded to be atrocious. In my case, she brought up politics a lot because she knew I followed it closely.

When I covered Congress, she watched C-Span so she could talk about it with me later. She’d look for me at news conferences. At the end of one news conference, I had a question for Trent Lott, then the Senate Majority Leader, and he put his arm around me as we sauntered out of camera range. I quickly got a call: “Why are you friends with Trent Lott?”

She was also a wonderful grandmother. She would get on the floor and play with our children, or read to them, and talk to them at their level. She also loved to meet our friends, all of whom were charmed by her spirit and personality. One friend of mine, who at the time had very ill parents, remarked, “Your mom gives me hope that old age won’t be so bad.”

As the years passed, and I grew out of teenage rebellion and settled into middle age, mom’s open-mindedness, her dogged approach to maintaining relationships and her willingness to try new things began to outweigh other traits that for whatever reason had annoyed me in my younger, less mature years.

Two years ago, the two of us spent ten days traveling through Europe together, visiting relatives in Holland and friends in London. We even attended a meeting of the “jaarclub,” her university sorority. It was the longest stretch we had been together since I had left home 36 years earlier. And I really discovered this remarkable woman who so many of you know and love.

Just weeks after we returned from Europe, she was diagnosed with cancer. She bravely decided to forgo any treatments that would ruin her zest for life. She was relentlessly positive and curious, active and engaged, up until the moment she died. As she put it, “This end of life process is so fascinating.”

Mom died on the 8th day of the eighth month, at the age of 88. In the Chinese culture, the number 8 is considered lucky and associated with good fortune. That’s why the Beijing Olympics started at 8:08 am on Aug. 8 in 2008. In China, a person with “Eight Buckets” is someone believed to have extraordinary talents.

Our mother was extraordinary in so many ways. She also had good fortune. She lived life on her own terms—and died on her own terms as well. I will miss her terribly. But I am also very proud she was my mother.