Birth date: May 24, 1931 Death date: May 10, 2018
Martha Burgess Martha (Mardy) Burgess, age 86 of Annapolis, MD, passed away peacefully at home on Thursday May 10, 2018, surrounded by family and loved ones. Mardy was born May 24,1931 to George Francis Peck and Edith Gertrude Pe Read Obituary
Happy Birthday, Mom.
You are free now, blooming with joy.
I love you,
Cindy
Hi Ken - this is Nick Patriciu. I knew your Mom since I was 5 years old. She had an indelible impact on my life and on so many lives. I miss her terribly. Thank you for your wonderful tribute to her, to this wonderful soul.
This is a lovely tri bute, Ken.
Kens Memorial for my Mom, Mardy Burgess
It is a bit odd for me to write this and not be there to deliver it myself as so much of my personal deliveries seem to be best when they come from the spirit of the moment, but in this case the spirit of the moment has been through the recall of a lifetime of experience with Mom and the fact that she is still here and has never left.
The memories are one thing, but for your Mom, they are almost not important as she is the center of your life, and yet as a kid you only see it as a kid and can only put it into perspective later in life. So is it Mom as a mom or Mom as the person/being that she is. I will try to do a little of both.
As a mom, she was always there, making tasty treats like puddings and custards, wonderful birthdays and Christmas celebrations. As a teen she made us prepare meals every week so that we could learn how to cook and truly delighted in what I would make, things like special hamburgers, homemade pizza and beef stroganoff were some of my big hits. Allowing me and my cousin Albert to terrorize the house with all of our crazy antics throughout, never saying a thing and probably delighting in the fact that this was the male side of her Peck family hopefully creating a bond for life. I would see her become a daughter when we visited our grandmother, Grandy, and experience the sensation of a parent having a parent of their own and feeling a much larger and softer sense of our family energy when we all were there. It was something that I had never felt before since when Grandy and Mom got together I was experiencing a Motherhood through time larger than me and yet knowing that it was always present within Mom even when she was packing lunches and cleaning the kitchen.
I would see her at the house at Martha’s Vineyard and have her spirits just soar as we got away from our regular life of New Jersey and become one with the ocean, island and the Sun. She would truly become a different person showing me that we all have our inner selves and outer selves that we put on as our roles and placements in life require, and yet as I saw her become so much larger as her inner self became free, I also realized that she never really hid any part of her inner self because it was always still there through the continual love and care of all that she put forth in every moment, and I would say to myself, ‘I guess this is possible and might be the way that it is supposed to be!’.
I would see her get lost into beautiful artwork and music that would again have her not me just Mom, but an entirely new, creative and magical being that was filled with joy and creative elation and wonder, ‘Is this the same person that makes my meals?’, and then say to myself, ‘I guess it is, and maybe this is the way that it is supposed to be!’.
When I was struggling with problems of life like bullies, classes and friends, she would just be there as a friend and support giving me the sense that there was always a third way out generally from trying to look at things from their side of the world and how to talk to them as a person and see beyond the fight or flight and I would say to myself, ‘I guess that this works and might be the way that it is supposed to be!’.
As my parents split up and I eventually left the home, she was the place where I knew that I could always come back to as I did not have any more home as the one that I grew up with, and when I finally did see her own space of creation, a one floor apartment in an older New Jersey Victorian, it was filled with so much creativity, love, care, color and expression that I hardly knew who it was that put it all together, not that I had never seen that energy before, but just not in that level of intensity and concentration, and so I said to myself, ‘I guess this is OK, and maybe this is the way that it is supposed to be!’.
When she met her new partner Al, I did not like him at first, he seemed rude, harsh, brash, arrogant, demanding, not Dad, and he turned Mom into a different person. He talked of things in the manner of a boss and not a friendly man, and yet when he talked of a life of doing things that I did not think were possible such as doing work overseas, being in the Navy on a submarine and being a scientist, then he started to become OK.
When I got to see their home in Bethesda, I got to see a very different type of partnership than I had ever seen before with my Dad, a very romantic woman who truly had her own life within the world of what Al was doing as well. She was a woman who was still creative and fun, but now with a powerful force of intellectual curiosity and expression that I had never seen before and yet still able to be there as Mom, and so seeing this woman as a loving partner, creative force, intellectual expression, and Mom was quite a new combination and so I said to myself, ‘I guess that This is possible and maybe this is the way that it is supposed to be!’.
When she and Al started to go on all of their trips, that seemed like at least 4-5 a year to Colorado for skiing, California to see us, and then Europe, South America, Africa, Asia, Moscow and more, I wondered why are they doing all of this and what are they getting accomplished. Then I would see the pictures and hear the stories, and it would all make sense, to see and experience an entirely different world with different people and cultures and yet see that we are really all part of the same.
When she started on he PhD, again I wondered why would she do this, what will she do with it, is this a new career for her? I would talk with her about it and we would have discussions on her Triune Brain, learning, evolution, development and more. I could understand this and it made sense. I was incredibly proud of her and her desire to put her years of generalized interest into a real tangible accomplishment that gave her a powerful leg to stand on to put even more credibility to her voice, and said to myself, ‘This truly is possible and definitely the way that is supposed to be!’.
There are so many more things that I could say about her life and all the myriad of aspects of her were observed and experienced by me, but the main point that I have seen through it all is that-
We are all complex beings and yet the one thing that brings us all together is our humanity, our care for others and our willingness to step beyond and accept that which initially might seem to be beyond us and yet when we give it time we realize that it has always been within us. Mom did all of these things and more and allowed me to see them first hand regardless on whether or not I comprehended it at the time. She also was an amazing presence that was not only defined by her experiential and intellectual accomplishments but mainly through her willingness just to step into the world of others by being interested, sharing, asking questions and truly listening to where the other person is. All of these things make up Martha Burgess and I am truly proud to be her son and to be able to say that she is my Mom.
Thank you for all of your presence and listening,
Kenneth Albert Burgess, her son.
