Eulogy to Connie Plank, 1940-2025: Sing along with Mom

Mom died April 30, 2025. Her obituary is at this link. What follows is my eulogy at her memorial service May 4, 2025:

Mom wanted us all to sing along.

If you lived at Wesley with her these past eight years, you probably witnessed that. She would break into “You Are My Sunshine” on the elevator to get people to join. 

I saw her approach a fellow resident and start singing an obscure 1957 Marty Robbins song to him, “A white sport coat and a …” and that person would continue, “…pink carnation. I’m all dressed up for the dance.”

Mom didn’t necessarily need CDs or cassettes or 8-tracks or even record albums or wax cylinders. Music was in the air and she would access it on demand. She was a music streaming service before there were music streaming services.

Mom seemed to operate as if she were in a Broadway musical and she was making up the libretto as she went along, encouraging others to harmonize with her. It was that sort of spirit on which she built her life.

She and Dad began a farm implement business together when he was 25 and she was 22, surely at that age, making it up as they went along. The business somehow survived The Farm Crises of the 1970s, The Farm Crises of the 1980s, The Farm Crises of the 1990s and The Farm Crises of the 2000s—while other similar shops went out of business. Dad and Mom went on for 50 years.

She especially learned how to improvise when she became a public health nurse in a rural southeast Iowa county with no hospital and few doctors. She would travel to remote homes down gravel or unmaintained dirt roads far into the boondocks, caring for patients who were often near death. Mom and the other nurses were forced to devise strategies for care, often on the fly, with what they had.

Both she and Dad were always on call. Farmers would call Dad at all hours needing him to come help with a piece of equipment. Families of patients would call Mom, needing her to be there quickly, commonly to care for loved ones in their final hours. 

Once, when we were home for Christmas, Mom got such a call in the midst of a blinding blizzard. The town had plowed snow from the streets, somehow missing Mom and Dad’s street. Mom called the city but was unable to convince them the street was unplowed and unpassable, until—frustrated—she described with an off-color, female anatomical slang reference, just how deep the snow was to her.

They plowed quickly after that.

And the snow was deeper than she described because her legs weren’t that long.

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Mom found joy in pulling music from the depths of her memory—old gospel tunes from her childhood and early rock ’n’ roll of her teenage years—to bring people together. 

When her father was in the nursing home in our hometown, Columbus Junction, Mom would help lead sing-a-longs for residents there. People who couldn’t remember what year it was or didn’t recognize family members would remember volumes of song lyrics from long ago.

Mom knew there was magic in that.

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In the last months of my Dad’s life, I would drive him and Mom to his chemotherapy treatments. One morning, we were fidgeting, waiting for time to leave. I had my ukulele with me and was noodling around playing nothing in particular and Mom said, "Play something we can all sing!" I played the first thing that popped into my head, one of the few songs I knew:

“Accentuate the positive, eliminate the negative, latch on to the affirmative, don’t mess with Mr. In-Betweeen …”

Without intending to, this song perfectly matched my Dad’s ever-optimistic outlook and his seeming inability to be pessimistic despite things like Farm Crises and his terrible cancer diagnosis.

And we all sang along, which was so weird. It was like a moment in a movie musical—out of thin air, we started singing a song that fit the moment. And we all knew all the words!  What’s weirder is that despite Mom’s desire for sing—a-longs, we didn’t do that as a family. We were not the Von Trapps or the Carter Family or the Partridge Family.

But we were that day.

We sang that song again at Dad’s funeral a couple of months later.

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Just last Monday, I was taking Mom to a medical appointment at a clinic inside the hospital. We were in the same building as a pediatric clinic. 

Into our elevator came a young couple, pushing a baby stroller with an oxygen tank, their eyes tired and downcast. The baby, tethered to the oxygen was crying and the parents winced in wordless apology. Mom peeked around the hood of the stroller and said, “Oh, sakes,” and started singing “Twinkle Twinkle, Little Star.”

The baby suddenly stopped crying. Had the song worked magic and soothed the baby’s pain? Or was the baby just so dumbfounded into silence as if to say, “What the—? Who the hell are you, lady?”

Well, kid, that’s my Mom and it wouldn’t be the first time she got such a reaction with her song.

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Mom still wants you all to sing along. At the end of today’s gathering Jodie and I will lead a song Mom liked, “I’ll Fly Away.” The lyrics are in your program, so you can sing along, as Mom wants you to.