A Eulogy for My Mother-in-Law-&-Love (Hui Fen Lei)
Schoedinger Funeral Home, Gahanna, OH
December 29, 2023

My name is Ann, and Hui Fen was my mother-in-law.

Before I got married, I always wondered what it would be like having in-laws. Tim and I loved watching that sitcom “Everybody Loves Raymond” where 60% of the show’s hilarity was about the cliched dynamic between Debra and her mother-in-law Marie. So, would it be like that for me, or would we actually get along and enjoy each other’s company?

Tim and I were friends for 4 years before we ever started dating. I’m convinced that it took us so long to get together because he had his mind set on marrying a traditional Chinese girl who knew both the language and the culture to mesh well with his family. And, well, I was not traditional at all! Instead, I was a classic Chinese school dropout so Americanized that I could have very well been the poster child for every ABC Banana and with the complex to boot! For those uninitiated to the culture of that slippery yellow peel fruit, an ABC Banana is an American Born Chinese person who’s judged by the color of her skin and the content of her culture: yellow on the outside, white on the inside!

But where man looks at the outward appearance, God looks at the heart. And it was God who ultimately brought us together as those years of friendship revealed our hearts while attracting us to each other in every way. And we know that love overlooks each other’s many faults….and cultural demographics.

I knew this to be true in Tim’s love for me, but time would tell if this would be true for his family. The Lei’s are an immigrant family – tough, hard-working, proud. The family of seven are fiercely loyal to each other, but their temperaments and personalities couldn’t be more different. Tim was the youngest of 5 kids and he was 8 years older than me, and so my in-laws fell into the same generational age as my grandparents, making our dynamic even more unique. My in-laws speak Mandarin and Cantonese; I speak English and Kentuckian. They eat their food with chopsticks, and I eat the same food with a fork.

But bonding happens when you break bread together - when you sit at the same table, say grace to God above (no matter the language as God knows them all), and share food with each other family style. And love grows as your father-in-law cooks for you as you sit at his kitchen table. And it grows fuller still as he serves you his delicious homemade Chinese food while handing you an American fork. My favorite memories with my in-laws are those weekend family meals we would have at Chinese restaurants around town. I first joined their weekend dinner tradition while I was dating Tim, and we kept it up after we got married. And when the kids were born, they joined in, too! The food was hot and the sense of family strong. Their surname means “thunder;” my given name means grace and peace. And combining those dynamic elements together in marriage resulted in not collision, but convergence. 

Arguably, the 2 people who love and know a man the deepest are his mom and his wifey. If I could have, early in my marriage, I would’ve asked my mother-in-law things in private like how to love her son well or what she worries the most about him or how she prays for him and what about. I would have asked her to tell me stories from his childhood to understand the purity of his nature before he reached the age where expectation and responsibility would impede his natural sense of wonder. But we didn’t speak the same language, so I didn’t.

But I’m a market researcher by trade and where I have teammates who study people based on what they say, my expertise is studying people based on what they do. A person’s self-perceptions and behaviors both matter. And I was never daunted by the challenge of learning about my mother-in-law and building relationship through observation and non-verbal engagements. And besides, 4 out of the 5 “love languages” are non-verbal. She and I would communicate through smiles, gestures, simple English phrases like “thank you,” and a knowing that is developed over time and through familiarity.

I first met her when she was 75. To me, she was always a most petite and reserved woman, a gentle matriarch. Being a mother who bore 5 children, she was child-like herself. She liked girly, pretty little things – like miniature toys, colorful birds, clip-on earrings, fuzzy socks, and light-up décor. Tim would tell me how she loved seeing those trucks that hauled stacked-up cars on the freeways, yet how it scared her being on remote roadways. She liked journals, and while I never saw her write in them, I imagine she had her private contemplations. She was curious – reading newspaper clippings and asking questions in part to learn and in part because she was nosy. She had her quirks like hiding things and wrapping them up in tissues and plastic bags. And from what I gather from Tim and Nancy, she liked stories – hearing anecdotes and telling (and retelling them).

She smiled often and deeply, but I didn’t often hear her laugh…. Chuckle, yes – but never any peals of laughter. Maybe it’s because I tend to laugh out loud and with abandon that I don’t recognize the quiet laughs. But just as I didn’t hear her laugh much, I don’t recall ever seeing her cry even when Tim died. But no matter outward appearance, God alone sees what a person carries in her heart and notices all the quiet laughs and silent cries.

She didn’t have it easy and even as she had an affinity for lovely things, she saw the glass half-empty. And her view wasn’t wrong as the glass is equally half-empty as it is half-full. I assume her worldview was shaped by the things she had seen and endured in her life...hard things. And in her old age as her health declined and as she required regular blood transfusions and had several falls, I saw for myself how life wasn’t easy for her.

Shortly after Tim had passed, I remember an occasion when she was hospitalized. Nancy was out-of-town, so I spent the evening with her in the hospital. The hospital can be an extra scary place when you don’t speak the language and when you’re constantly visited by so many medical staff checking your vitals, poking you, and administering blood transfusions. And for that night, I got to watch over her, take care of her, keep her company, and be her support. Caregivers know that it’s a burden full of honor to take care of a loved one. And man, you should’ve witnessed the two of us that night – never more had either of us spoken our own dialect of “Chinglish” than during that hospital stay! Her broken and elementary English matched by my broken and elementary Chinese…. the words we exchanged were so poorly spoken yet so affirming to each other! And there I realized that more than fragile, she was precious. Delicate for sure, yet treasured more.

Like my parents, I’ve been a caregiver, so I have a tender heart to those fulfilling those honorable roles. Nancy – you’ve provided for your parents in ways that only they and God know. It’s difficult – both physically exhausting and emotionally taxing. And you’ve served them well as your life has been a kind of living, loving sacrifice. Thank you, dear sister. Over the past year, I’ve watched you and Frank take turns visiting, feeding, changing, and comforting Mom. Our heartfelt thanks to you both for carrying her (with the Lord’s help) through her hardest and final season. Well done.

As she was declining and as I was anticipating her eventual passing, I was thinking to myself how to grieve and honor the mother of my late husband. Like what would Tim do, and should I stand in his place or should I just grieve her loss in context of my own relationship with her? Truth is, I can never fill the place of her son just as I cannot fill the role of dad to my kids. This week, as I was thinking about what to share, a memory crossed my mind. Shortly after Tim and I married, an incident happened relating to her age and increasing fragility. While I don’t recall the specific details of her health issue, I remember one evening seeing Tim sitting on our bed with his head in his hands; he was quiet and sad, if not heartbroken. You know, there comes a time in an adult child’s life when he realizes his parents are not invincible after all, and the reality of mortality and the fragility of life hits him. And it’s weighty. Regardless of whether it happens subtly or not, it happens. And it’s a humbling moment. For Tim, that realization hit him there then, and it hit him hard. As his wife, I felt his sadness in a way that broke my heart, too. In moments like those, there are no words appropriate nor needed. In moments like those, all that’s needed is to create space and to sit quietly with each other in that space. We might say that Tim isn’t here to grieve his mother’s passing. But I’ll tell you that he was fully present for the human emotion and experience of grieving her loss years before today. We only miss what we love. And grief only exists where love first resided.

My profession teaches me to evaluate things objectively. There’s always room to make inferences, but we stick to what we know to be true. On our relationship: she was made in China; I was made in the U.S.A., and we both resided in The Herb Capital of Ohio. We didn’t speak the same language, and so we didn’t communicate through words but through actions and emotions which are universally understood. We shared the name “Mrs. Lei” and deeply loved the same man – her son, my late husband. I knew her son for 12 years, but I knew her for 15. I called her Ma and she called me Ann-Ping. She died early on Christmas morning as Santa was still making his rounds. She was my mother-in-law by marriage and remained so even after my marriage died. And time, circumstances, and choice revealed that our bond exceeded the letter of the law as she was also my mother-in-love. I loved her beyond my words. And the truest fact of all is that she was loved by God.

Of all the gifts I may have given her over the years, the best ones I gave her were loving her son – her Bao - to my core and giving her the joys of John and Maria - her 4th and 5th grandchildren - and watching them grow. I recall with such fondness, her whole face lighting up whenever she would see my kids. How she would so skillfully cut John’s hair as a baby while he slept or how she would hold Maria’s hand and watch her face. Through my daughter-in-law eyes, I witnessed the purity and clarity of how the really young and the really old communicate with each other – less through words, more through touch and expression. Where those outside of our family might look at our outward appearance and see our generational and age gaps along with our varying shades of Asian culture, we Lei’s have grown to see and know each other’s heart. And today, I honor her as one of her daughters. In closing, I’ll share my children’s words on their Nai Nai.

With love from John: “She was always a great character; I heard from the visits at Goo Goo’s house that she was a caring mother, and I always saw that in her face and smile, she would always look and I think I heard a silent “thank you.” It seemed she valued time, and the time with her loved ones. She would stare in silence, and I suppose, contemplation at the table when she drank something, like she was valuing this moment of peace.” 

With love from Maria: “Nai nai was a joyful woman who spread joy into the hearts of everyone. In my personal experience we would talk Chinese to each other, and it would make me smile. She was always appreciative over everything and kindly smiled to everyone she would see. It was always a tradition to sit in nancys house and open christmas presents. And as ye ye and nai nai opened me and my brothers canvases we made we couldn’t help but be happy because of their happy faces. When she was alive and we spoke Chinese to each other she would always be impressed by my skill even if it was very little. It was nice when she was around and she is one example and role model of showing kindness and having fun while she was still around.”

Ma, wo-men hen ai ni.