DAY 42: Speeches

What a wonderful weekend.

My speeches at Rocky Mountain Church went well. Here's the altar area during the opening song:


Everybody greeted me with smiles and words of encouragement, and seemed happy to finally receive a direct connection to the family they've been so generously helping these past six weeks.

Before I was called up to speak, a little girl named Zea Speyer stared at me over her grandfather, Mike Parks's, shoulder. I'm not sure why she was so fascinated, but I had to take a picture of her and her gremlin hair:


Here's the text of my speech:

It's a pleasure being here with you today.

I graduated from Park High School in 1989, and was blessed to grow up in beautiful Estes Valley. I went to C.U. Boulder, then to work in Silicon Valley and Los Angeles, and then to Japan, where I live now about two hours outside of Tokyo. From those distant places, I've developed a new appreciation for the mountains where I grew up.

We all know of their majesty. There's a wonder in the clean air, the abundant wildlife, the stars as our private bedroom ceiling each night. But there's something beyond the purity of the place that makes this valley special. There's a quality to the people. I'll come back to that in a moment.


My mother Elizabeth Kelly has always been a caregiver. From the time when she was a little girl growing up in Los Angeles, she cared for animals. She started with small ones, dogs, cats, and chickens, which was quite a feat in the confines of the big city. Later, she dreamed of owning larger animals in a countryside setting, a dream that came true when she moved to Allenspark.

She gave birth to me when she was just twenty, and began a new chapter of caring in her life: for her children. With our father, she had four more children and devoted her life to running our home. She cleaned, cooked, and cared. At that time, our family was devout Catholic, our father a strongly religious figure. He made clear to us children in talks after dinner that there are three things in life, in this order, and never to be forgotten: God, family, and country. I remember thinking as I watched my friends' families go through divorces, that I was lucky to be from one of the last intact nuclear families. Divorce would not haunt the Kellys.

You can imagine the shock to our family, then, when that devout father hit midlife, found a new sports car, a pair of leather gloves, and a younger woman, and headed into the sunset, leaving behind our mother with four young children still at home.

I was the luckiest of the kids. I had already left home for college. The next four and my mother, however, were in the headlights of the freight train known as divorce. If you've ever been through it, you know the range of emotions, the financial difficulty, the never-ending questions. My family faced all of that, and I see the effects in them to this day. It's an awful thing to lose a husband. It's an awful thing to lose a father.

I helped my mother to manage her finances, which were tenuous because she had no marketable skills. Support from her ex-husband ramped down over time as the kids grew older and her maintenance dwindled. I encouraged her to use some of the early money to get training as a paralegal or nurse, something that would pay well. She didn't want to, though. She wanted to continue caring full-time for her children, my younger brothers and sisters.

Then, she surprised me one day by saying she wanted to adopt two more children.

"Beg your pardon?" I said. "What haven't you heard during our talks about money? Of all the people in the world, do you really think you're the most eligible to be taking on additional dependents?"

"No," she replied, "but there are needy children and I'm in a position to care for them. I want to do it."

And she did. Into our family came Daniel and Charlie, two wonderful little brothers, whom all of you know well. They added new color to our family, literally. Let's just say it's not hard to spot Daniel on the Estes Park Bobcat basketball court!

Years later, when it was clear that Mom would need to find some kind of work, she chose eldercare. Again, the theme of caring came up. She's spent the last several years caring for elderly people in their homes. I've visited some of them with her, and smiled to see her fine people skills at work. She listens. She talks. She connects. People don't feel that they're wasting their words when they pour them out to Liz Kelly. She cares. Ask anybody who knows her.

On October 30, my sister, Emily, and Mom went on a horseback ride on Bunce School Road near Allenspark. They encountered a patch of ice and stepped off the road to avoid it. Mom's horse's hoof was caught in some downed barbed wire, and the horse spooked. Mom is an excellent rider, but that day she was dislodged from her seat. She didn't fall off, but she leaned to the left just as the horse ran past a tree on that side. Mom smashed into it.

The impact broke the bones of her face, particularly her left eye orbit. It damaged her optical nerve and created an intracerebral hematoma, blood in the brain, behind her left eye. It shattered her left arm above and below the elbow, broke the ribs on her left, lacerated her liver, and destroyed her spleen. You wouldn't believe what one horse and one tree can accomplish in one bad moment.

Emily rushed to a house and called 9-1-1. Mom was taken by Flight for Life to St. Anthony Hospital in Denver. I received the call from there, and, I tell you, it's one I'll never forget. Emily could barely get the words out. The hospital said to gather the family and meet not with the doctor, but with the chaplain.

That's never a good sign.

I hurried to Colorado in 48 hours, which may sound fast to you, but it was the longest two days I can recall. It was maddening on the plane, not knowing what I would find upon my arrival. When at last I arrived at Mom's bedside, I was elated, to the confusion of my siblings. Emily asked if I understood the situation and I said yes.

"Here's what I understand," I said. "I got a call in Japan that my mother was dying and I thought I was flying to a funeral. I wasn't. I'm standing here beside her bed and she's clinging to life. She's alive. There's hope."

And she still clings to this day, her forty-second one in the hospital. During this time, our family has been bathed in kindness from this church and this community. People I'd never seen showed up to offer support, and not just words.

Chris Moody and his wife came down with a duffel bag full of snacks and drinks that I didn't even know I'd wanted until receiving them.

Mark Roskam and his wife came down to talk with us and pray around my mother's bedside.

One day, I was standing in the hallway talking with my brother when a tall woman I'd never seen before walked up.

"Kelly?" she asked.

"Yes."

"I have a house."

I hesitated. "Me, too. Good for you. May I help you?"

It was Sue Barosh, who'd come to offer us the use of her home in Lakewood. She lent me her library card and gave me a tour of the neighborhoods near the hospital so I'd know where to eat, where to get away.

The church established a medical fund and has continue pumping it with money to use toward curing my mother. People have brought food, made quilts, paid for gas, and somebody even strapped a Christmas tree to the roof of Emily's car. It's a picture perfect Douglas Fir, thick and beautiful, and we haven't the foggiest idea which kind soul in this town brought it to us.

Mom visited me twice in Japan and her magnetic personality made friends over there, too. When they heard the news, they formed two separate teams to fold two sets of one-thousand cranes of hope. Daniel and Charlie, would you bring those up here?

[The boys carried the cranes to the front of the church.]

This big, colorful set is from the main island of Honshu and this smaller, prim set is from the southern island of Kyushu. They folded these by hand, while thinking positive, healing thoughts about Mom. Later, when Mom wakes up, she'll have tangible evidence that people around the world were with her. Thank you, boys.

[Daniel and Charlie returned to their seats.]

Mom still fights on at the hospital. She's nowhere near being well yet, but she has seven good reasons to wake up, and a lot more beyond us.

And that brings me back to what's special about this valley. The mountains are striking, the wind in the needles of a ponderosa hypnotic, and the pace an era away from the modern frenzy. But there's something you can't quite put your finger on, and I think that something is the care of our own. The countrysides of the world harbor the finest people I've ever met, and this countryside is the finest among those. It's been years since I've lived here, yet I feel I never left. I'm grateful to all of you for that.

Your care for this caregiver, our mother, is the very picture of magnanimity. On behalf of all of us in the Kelly family, I thank you.

Following the second service on Sunday, I had lunch with Chris Moody at Mary's Lake Lodge, then spent the afternoon and evening at home decorating that Christmas tree and having a cozy dinner with our family and two friends.

Mom is not home with us this year, but her stocking is hung by the chimney with care, at the front of the line, forever the head of our family.