EULOGY GIVEN BY MARC FRIEDMAN********* Jeanette was the Fourth and youngest child of Meyer and Lena Robinson. The maternal side was Zacharewitz. Her original birth certificate listed her as Yeta. The story goes that her older sister Esther was enraged at the name choice as being too old country and insisted on the official birth record change to Jeanette. The family had a long history as a merchant family. Meyer established a successful dry goods store in Passaic, New Jersey. The family also has a history of risk taking. Jeanette's brother Jack swam across the Hudson River. Meyer ran a brace of fast beautiful horses with a carriage. He died after a riding accident, while Jeanette was a youngster. My mother too liked taking a bit of risk. She fell while roller skating while holding onto a bus and fractured her forearm. Lena, Jeanette's' mother was forced to be the sole provider in Meyer's absence. She ran the store and the family. Then there was the depression. The family was forced to live off the stock on hand; the beautiful silk stockings and fine apparel that Meyer had so diligently accumulated. They didn't have much but survived intact. My mother was, I believe, deprived of a lot of love due to these circumstances and spent considerable time living with relatives in order for her to receive the basics. Esther, her older sister, was very much her surrogate mom. I was aware of that even as a child. Jeanette went to the Barnett School of Nursing, a proprietary training school. It was a dormitory affair. She always lamented how the owners shorted them on rations. Her cousin, Leo, would drive down and take her and her friends out for a big dinner on Sundays that would have to last the week. She did her clinical year at the Philadelphia Hospital, a large open ward charity hospital. She told me the smell of death was thick in the air there. Her nights were spent pronouncing patients and changing bandages. With World War 2 she joined the war effort at Curtis Wright as an industrial triage nurse at the aircraft assembly factory. She was filled warm memories of her for once, carefree life, as a beautiful thin and shapely nurse pursued by many men. She says she double dated with Frank Sinatra. Who's to argue. She met my father post war. He was smitten by her. It was love at first sight for him and he won her by persistence. He broke down her resistance. They were married in a New York City hotel and honeymooned in Havana. Apparently, that train ride wore thin on her and she complained about it in her recollections, way into her 80's. Cory, my older brother was born when they still lived at 30 East 80th Street in Manhattan. This address is a very tony address. They both, but my mother especially, loved the glamour of the upper East side. Anyone who knew my mom knows of her style and taste. Let's be real, the first magazine I ever read was Vogue. They almost bought a brownstone in the neighborhood. Both my mom and my dad had a keen eye for goods and workmanship. I believe its genetic. My Mollye's, tastes,color preferences,style and love of what is new and out with the old is genetically transmitted from my mother. With the pending arrival of me in 1950 , my father just didn't think they could swing the upper east side on his income. She reluctantly agreed to move into a relatively upscale suburb of NYC, a new Levitt development called the "Roslyn Country Club". While it was originally fifty percent Jewish, within a relatively short period it was over ninety percent Jewish. She never lost her love for the big city. Most weekends of my childhood were spent traveling into NYC. The typical outing was either the Metropolitan Museum or the Guggenheim or Modern. Followed by a walk down Fifth avenue to look at the windows and then to our little families altar of worship, the Bo Bo tea room,located at 20 1/2 Pell street. Now, you can accuse me of selective memory but that food is still the best damn Chinese food I have ever had. All other places are dwarfed in comparison to the Bo Bo. That restaurant was sometimes the only thing we all would all agree on. When I was in Elementary school my mother went back to work as a nurse. She Worked for the Roslyn Visiting Nurse Association. She was so much happier there. She took care of a broad class of people from paupers to the Vanderbilts. One grateful client's husband was the head flower gardener for one of the Vanderbilts who lived in a walled estate (hundreds of acres) in Old Westbury. For my brother's bar mitzvah he made sure that the daily flowers were diverted to Jeanette. You have never seen flowers like this. My mom wanted to do something creative. She was tired of looking at other people's art and longed for a voice of her own. She longed for something that would give her recognition. The small child in her that had been neglected wanted so much to be seen. I remember her first tentative steps with an artsy neighborhood woman. She was frustrated and wanted a better chance at finding herself. I'm not quite sure how she settled onto the Arts Student League a westside art school with a long and deep relationship in the vibrant New York art scene. She enrolled and went at it with a zeal and an intensity that electrified her. It was her salvation. She idolized and worshiped her instructors especially Bert Silverman. He was her mentor and while I do not recall meeting him, he was ever on her mind as an inspiration. She always had an intuitive grasp of color and shape. But it was honed and refined over years of multiple trips into the west side of the city to paint at the league. The Art Student League worked fine while we lived in Roslyn and then Muttontown but when they moved to Westhampton which is way out on the island, it was too far to comfortably travel to. But by then she had developed the skill and the confidence to find more models and more opportunities on her own. They built a studio in their West Hampton home as well as a swimming pool. They also became inveterate travelers mostly to western Europe for yearly art, food, wine and culture. They never could get enough of that. When Sharon and I moved to Tucson for my anesthesia residency(my second first was internal medicine) they became snow birds, fleeing the brutal east coast winters. They would first rent a long term hotel but ended buying a patio home in Sheraton El Concistador. She loved that town home that hugged the mountains. She would sit and wait for the wildlife, the birds and the occasional bobcat. That's where time started to catch up with them. My father first. His diabetes which I begged him to treat definitively with a severe diet caught up with him and the decline started. They could not keep up the independence that both needed more than anything. They both loved the open road. Travel. Going to a new place. They went to places decades before anyone else. They ate at Harry's Bar in Venice, it seems the day after Hemingway was there. They were wintering in San Miguel de Allende way before any other tourist found it. My father was the linguist, my mother was his inspiration. My mom's medical conditions, things that happened to her that were no fault of her own. Perhaps it started with a little rheumatic fever as a child. Slowly ground on. The pacemaker the atrial fibrillation the anti coagulation and then my beautiful wondrous soulful inciteful savagely artistic woman who maybe didn't have the right parenting skills as a young parent but spent the rest of her life compensating for that with her adult class and style slowly was diminished and reduced through embolic cerebral vascular accidents. When the agitation over the loss of her faculties receded a sweet child with a smile for you came out. Who never frowned, who smiled and just wanted to hold you hand, became more present. She would be at the point of death. Others would have already succumbed. Then she would rally and awaken and the smile would return. Her care givers especially Mackey,Carmen and Elizabeth saw that every day and loved her so so much. I am so happy that her final venerable period was spent under their care. And I am so thankful for Ramon Sylvester who's big heart and intellect runs the whole show. My mother has passed into eternity an we can all stop especially me to remember a beautiful spirit who soared high into the sky and left us with tangible beauty to see where she is right now. Its all hanging in my house. Please enjoy it later today or any day. My door is always open. *************************************************************************************************** THIS SERVICE WAS BROADCAST LIVE AT 12:30 PM PST, ON WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 5TH, 2009. TO SEE AND HEAR THE SERVICE, CLICK ON "ATTEND LIVE SERVICE" BELOW. TECHNICAL PROBLEMS INTERRUPTED THE BROADCAST. MARC FRIEDMAN'S EULOGY HAS BEEN TAPED AGAIN AND INSERTED IN THE VIDEO BELOW. THE ORIGINAL TEXT ALSO APPEARS IN ITS ENTIRETY ABOVE.