SOUL FOOD:Drawing inspiration from one who lived a ‘pay it forward’ life

A funeral has never made the cut for any top-50 holiday gifts list.

Nevertheless, in the lives of some, death elbows its way in. Then, holiday season or not, a funeral becomes requisite.

So it was this year for Hildegard Wilhelmina Augusta Matilda Carolina Peters and her daughter Susan, who last weekend faced the task of giving her mother back to God.

I knew Hildegard Peters because she was a neighbor and friend of my mother. Thirty-four years ago, she bought a house in Costa Mesa, across the street and three doors down from where my mother still lives.

At the time, I was living in Humboldt County, attending college. The breaks between quarters were short and the distance from Humboldt to Orange County long.

For a couple of years I didn’t own a car, so traveling home meant a marathon journey by Greyhound bus. By car, the winding and often rain-swept roads in northern logging territory could be treacherous.

My visits home during those years tended to be rare and brief. So I didn’t meet Hildegard right away.

It was after college, when off-and-on I lived nearer by, that I got to meet the woman with the German name and accent. Over time I came to know her a bit.

Only at her memorial service did I learn just how little a bit.

For years I knew Hildegard as one of my mother’s neighbors who enjoyed baking. Much like my mother’s English neighbor Dottie still is, Hildegard was a formidable baker. What she baked she shared to many a beneficiary’s delight.

I also knew Hildegard for her roses. She loved, I think, all flowers and plants.

A few years ago for Christmas, I gave her some Amaryllis bulbs, and every Christmas afterward she’d tell me about how they had divided and how they had multiplied. She’d tell me how lovely they were and thanked me for them yet again.

But roses were surely her favorites. Often, as I pulled up to my mother’s house or drove away, I’d see Hildegard bent to tend the many bushes she had planted in front of her house.

She must have known the sound of my car. As I’d pass, she’d never fail to raise her head. With a fistful of blooms or a bunch of thorny, inferior canes she’d just pruned away, she’d lift an arm, smile and wave.

I knew Hildegard as the proud and extraordinarily devoted mother of an only daughter, a daughter equally devoted to her mother, a daughter about the same age as me.

After my father’s death, I knew Hildegard to keep a much closer watch of my mother. If the drapes didn’t open early enough or if the newspaper lay on the driveway too long, she would call me.

Hers joined the phone numbers in my cellphone to call as soon as my mother was out of recovery following any of her many surgeries in recent years. Often when Hildegard and I talked, I was tired, with many more phone calls yet to make. So on those occasions and others — as when I’d ask her about Susan during her daughter’s difficult courses of chemotherapy — our conversations could be friendly and warm, yet brief.

What I never knew about Hildegard Peters was that between her first name and her last were four more names. And, until the day of her funeral, I never knew how much the life of Hildegard Wilhelmina Augusta Matilda Carolina Peters was something of a real-life “Pay It Forward.”

She was born in 1928, in Detmold, Germany, and grew up on a farm during some of Germany’s most difficult years. As a young woman, she journeyed to England to work in London as an au pair.

It was there, some years later, that an employer became Hildegard’s benefactor. The man, who had learned that his employee had a sister living in California, offered to pay her passage and passage for her young daughter to come to the United States.

Hildegard accepted and apparently never forgot her employer’s generosity. She and Susan sailed to New York aboard the Queen Mary, then came by Greyhound bus to California.

While Hildegard worked three and sometimes four jobs to save money for an apartment, she and Susan lived with her sister. Hildegard never seemed to expect things to come easy.

For most of her life in California she worked hard as an industrial seamstress, stitching together hot air balloons, sails, wet suits and other diving equipment. In time, she saved money enough to buy her own house.

In that house, two nights before Christmas, with her beloved 13-year-old dog Phantom at his side, Hildegard laid down to sleep for the last time.

At her memorial service last weekend, I learned from those who knew her best how very much she loved people and loved life. Hildegard was a woman, they said, who lived life to its fullest and gave more than she ever took.

She especially had a big heart for struggling immigrants and for those who had nowhere to call home.

During the years she lived across the street from my mother, Hildegard first took a co-worker with two young daughters into her home at a time when they had nowhere else to go. Later, she did the same for a young immigrant man, his wife and his toddler son.

Along with her daughter Susan, each of them attended Hildegard’s memorial service and graveside burial with loving, grateful and broken hearts. In time, each of them — I’m confident — will come to do what a poem in the memorial service program expressed Hildegard would want: “Smile, open your eyes, love and go on.”

As I listened to the story of Hildegard’s life and to the words of those whose lives she so touched, for a moment I closed my eyes.

I closed my eyes to wonder: What would this world be like if each of us could find the heart to live more like Hildegard did?