What is this wondrous gift I’ve been given?
It’s too marvelous to even comprehend.
Who am I that this Savior would love me forever?
Give me joy beyond measure, and peace without end?
What grace, amazing grace.
—“WHAT GRACE” BY KATHIE LEE GIFFORD AND CHUCK HARMONY & CLAUDE KELLY OF LOUIS YORK
I love stories. Everyone has them, and it’s a gift to listen to others tell theirs. People come alive when they share their stories. And they feel validated that someone wants to hear them.
You want to feel really good? Go into a nursing home or a hospital and ask the people you meet to tell you their story. For some of them—and probably way too many—it will be the first time anyone has asked. And, oh, what stories most all of them have to tell.
When I first joined TODAY it was with the understanding that I would be allowed to bring my love for theater—which is actually storytelling—to a live television audience. I’m grateful to our executive producer at the time, Jim Bell, for honoring that commitment.
My desire was to have a monthly segment called “Everyone Has a Story” in which our viewers would submit their personal accounts and we would choose one to turn into a song. Then we would welcome the viewer to our sofa and perform the song that my writing partner, David Friedman, and I had created. Sung by the greatest singers in the world: Broadway stars!
In eleven years we wrote one hundred “Everyone Has a Story” songs and saw one hundred ordinary people with extraordinary lives respond in real time. It was a total joy and privilege to bring these unique experiences to life.
When I was growing up, I was fascinated by my parents’ life stories. They were heartbreaking but ultimately triumphant, as all the best ones are.
Both of my parents’ childhoods were like Dickens novels—child abandoned, child abused, child unloved, and child left hopeless until . . . love showed up and changed everything.
My father’s Russian/Jewish immigrant father abandoned his wife and five young children. He drank too much and ran around too much—an all-too-common tale then and now.
My mother’s mother died of tuberculosis when my mom was two, followed a year later by my mother’s only brother, who died from measles. The stock market had crashed, and my mother’s father had lost his fortune and successful career in publishing. He, too, took to alcohol to numb the pain and soon married an equally wounded woman who shared his addictions. Once a classical violinist, my maternal grandfather descended into a haze of despair ending in frequent booze-fueled fights with his wife and trips to jail in the “paddy wagon.” My mom, Joanie, and her sister, Marilyn, had to go in the paddy wagon as well because there was no one to care for them.
My grandfather died when my mother was nine years old. Joanie’s sense of shame was born of such events. Her whole life she would battle a profound but deeply embedded lie in her soul: she wasn’t loved, she wasn’t good enough, and she was unworthy of happiness. Her grandmother was the only light in her broken life.
Quite old already and crippled with rheumatoid arthritis in her feet, my great-grandmother struggled to care for her two young granddaughters and teach them how to survive in such a heartless, brutally unfair world. Then she, too, died when Joanie was fifteen. Mom’s sister, Marilyn, had married young and moved away. Joanie was truly alone in the world.
Because of this, Joanie had to drop out of school and go to work at the local five-and-dime store, living in her one and only girlfriend’s house and forced to give almost every cent she earned to the friend’s mother to help pay the rent. Into this hopelessness, love arrived in the form of a lanky, athletic, hardworking young naval petty officer, my daddy, Eppie Epstein.
My dad literally rescued my mom from that house and took her home to his. His family rejected her, too, but Daddy loved and protected her for the next fifty-four years.
My daddy’s father, Meyer “Sam” Epstein, was a complicated man. Although he was by all accounts a terrible husband and father, he had a reputation as a warm and generous man to the neediest in his neighborhood. I can’t imagine what my daddy had to do to reconcile his father’s coldness and emotional abuse with the outpouring of affection his father displayed to total strangers.
Sam Epstein was a Jew by birth and heritage, but he was not a religious man. My father’s mother, Evelyn, was not religious either. But one very hot and sticky summer day, when my father was eight, she sent all five of her children to the church down the street when she had reached her limit and couldn’t take any more of their rowdiness.
That’s how my father found himself at Vacation Bible School asking Jesus into his heart. Seven years later, when he was walking around the Maryland State House in Annapolis, a gang of young hooligans attacked him, throwing rocks at him and screaming, “Christ killer! Christ killer! Christ killer!” It breaks my heart now to think of the terrible confusion my father had to live with because of his last name and heritage.
When my dad was fourteen years old, he went to work and gave all the money he made to his mother so she could buy an old used car. Evelyn eventually married again, only to lose her husband, David, and her oldest son, Paul, in World War II. Her middle son, Carol (pronounced Carl), was wounded. Only my daddy returned home from the war unscathed physically, but he was deeply affected emotionally.
Unlike Mom, Daddy never spoke of the past. He suffered privately and stoically. He was incredibly healthy—I only saw him get one cold in all the years I knew and loved him. He worked hard every day of his life and helped everyone who asked him for it, and many who didn’t.
One day when I was quite young I remember hearing my parents whispering about Sam Epstein. Apparently, he was gravely ill in a hospital in Baltimore, asking for his children to come to his bedside. My father was the only one who went. Mom later told us that Daddy stood by his father’s bed and lovingly held his hand.
“Forgive me, son,” his father whispered.
“I forgive you, Pop,” is all my daddy said as his father died.
I believe with all my heart that God saw my daddy in that hospital room that day. He saw all the woundedness and hurt inside of him. And God shed a tear when my daddy extended mercy to the man who had never given it in return. Grace . . . amazing grace.
Both of my parents were born into pain and loss. But they were determined to finally have a real family—although at the time they had no idea what that actually looked like. Eventually it looked like my older brother, David; me; my baby sister, Michie; and a mutt named Zorro.
Were there hard times along the way? Way too many of them. But by the grace of God they both came to know and love their Creator and Lord and began new lives in Him. They built character in themselves and each other and then built it into their children. They never gave up even as their own bodies began to give out to age, disease, and weariness.
My father, Eppie, was diagnosed with Lewy body dementia and began an eight-year nightmare of mental and physical deterioration. He died after eight days in hospice at home on November 19, 2002. My mother had just been reciting the Twenty-Third Psalm for the umpteenth time when he suddenly lifted up, opened his eyes, let out a deep breath, and settled peacefully back onto his pillow.
Gone home . . . to his heavenly Father who had never abandoned him, never forgotten him, never disappointed him. God loved him even in his mother’s unhappy womb.
Mom was a widow for the next fifteen years. Eventually we had to move her into an assisted living facility called Baywoods on the banks of the Severn River in Annapolis, where my daddy had been born and had grown into a great man.
She lived for her family’s visits, Hallmark movies, and her biblical archaeological magazines. Everyone was her friend. She lit up every room she went into and stopped to talk (endlessly!) with anyone she happened to encounter in her tiny, sheltered world. She maintained her childlike love for Jesus, which had been born of great suffering. She knew Him intimately, for she knew deep in her soul that He had saved her life by sacrificing His.
Mom could no longer travel to visit my brother and me up north, so Dave and I began monthly visits to see her in Annapolis. We’d stay with our sister, Michie, near Annapolis and spend as much time with Mom as we could, talking and often taking her to her favorite restaurant, Chart House.
I lost count of the trips, but I treasure the memory of the long rides my adorable brother and I would take on the train from New York and the early morning talks with my sister, who had long ago taken on the full-time job of caretaker to our parents.
Late in August 2017, Dave and I caught the train as usual and looked forward to watching our mom delight in all the fun of having her children; her granddaughter, Shannie; Shannie’s husband, Mark; and their two adorable little boys, Aaron and Zach, with her.
Unlike my daddy, Mom never lost her famous appetite. She could eat all of us under the table and feel no shame. Our last dinner together was no different. She ate her whole meal of crab cakes and moved on to everybody else’s. She had a tiny sip of red wine and laughed at whatever anybody said. When we returned to Baywoods, the night nurse greeted Mom with great joy and promised she’d be in soon to give Mom her medications. It always made me sad to change Mom out of her clothes and into her nightgown, robe, and slippers. How many times had she done that for all of us when we were little? I hated leaving her there alone, although of course she wasn’t there alone at all. She said she always felt her Eppie next to her and the Lord, who she knew without a doubt would never leave her side.
I settled Mom into her cozy chair and began to put on her slippers. Mom had always been beautiful, a true world-class lovely woman. But she had inherited her grandmother’s feet, and by age eighty-seven, it seemed that every toe lived in a different zip code. I don’t know why the sight of them this particular time broke my heart.
How does she even walk on them, Lord? I silently prayed and loved on her with all my goodbyes while fighting tears. We would always linger with her, but eventually, we had to leave.
That night I prayed, “Oh, please, Jesus, take Mommy home. Let her run on two perfect feet right into Your loving arms.”
Two weeks later, God answered my prayer. Mom died peacefully in her sleep and woke up with Jesus, her Eppie, her mother, her father, her brother, her sister, and her precious grandmother who had loved her and cared for her with those incredibly painful, crippled feet. Now, Nana’s feet were perfect too.
I miss my mom so much. I miss that amazing joyful smile and her contagious cackle of a laugh. I miss her being hysterically funny because she had no idea that she was hysterically funny. I love thinking about her now perfect feet and the everlasting life she has begun with her beloved Savior.
Someday it will be too late to kiss your mother one last time, so make the most of every opportunity you have with her. And if she’s still living, call her now and maybe take her for a pedicure. One day you’ll be really glad that you did.