This is my mother, Garnet Elizabeth Pfeifer (then Swann, nee Kocurek), with my sister, Garnet Nixon, and me, Greg Swann, around 1965. Our sister Gretchen had not yet been born when this picture was taken, but if you look at the photos of her below, you'll see what my mom looked like in her thirties.
My mother was a sweet, smart, funny, hard-headed, practical woman. Simple and direct, she was good at getting things done quickly, and she didn't have a lot of patience for jobs that couldn't be done quickly. But she was a very social person, too, so she spent a lot of her time flitting from one visit to the next, catching up on her friends and loved ones and catching them up on everyone else. If you were in her life, you were all the way in it, and she would never fail to hold up her end of your relationship.
My mom was country by choice, in a way that made it easy for people who affect to a greater sophistication to ignore and dismiss her. But she herself was without affectation, without guile, without any hidden agendas. She was one of the most fundamentally decent people I have ever known, and she taught me everything I know about judging people by their choices and their behavior, not their external circumstances.
She was union all the way and a Democrat even to her own detriment, but she could disagree not just without being disagreeable but by being fun and spirited and good-hearted in debate. She read the newspaper every day, but she never let the weight of the world weigh her down. She was always kind and funny and phlegmatic, too practical ever to be tragic in her demeanor.
She was a luddite of the most committed kind, a devout technophobe. I tried more than once to enlist her into the wired life, and I had not given up hope that I might someday get a tablet computer into her lap. She was so much in love with her grandchildren that I was betting that Facebook would win her over in the end. She won that bet by racing too soon to the grave.
So it's funny that I'm making this web page as her virtual shrine, since she would never have seen it, not unless one of my sisters or her brothers made her sit down and take a look. This is my world, not hers, but it's a way that I can share some of her world with everyone who might want to see it.
My "favorites" page on my phone consists of seven people. My mother was one of them, someone I would call just out of the blue, when I had the time, when I hadn't talked to her for too long. Every phone call is fun for me – I learned that from her – but she was the only person in my life that I would call just for fun. Of all the things I will miss about her, I already miss that the most.
Everyone who knew her loved her, and she loved everyone she loved without boundaries, without reservation, without ever holding anything back. The world is a poorer place without her.
This is my mother, Garnet Elizabeth Pfeifer (then Swann, nee Kocurek), with my sister, Garnet Nixon, and me, Greg Swann, around 1965. Our sister Gretchen had not yet been born when this picture was taken, but if you look at the photos of her below, you'll see what my mom looked like in her thirties.
