FARMINGTON – The gray cold heavy rain of the afternoon was in stark contrast to the golden warm glow inside Old South Congregational Church as a few hundred people gathered to remember and celebrate Kay Mills on Friday.
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Maine’s Senators Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins, Congressman Michael Michaud, Maine Senate president and gubernatorial candidate Libby Mitchell, were among those hundreds who walked into the historic church filled with the stringed music played by more than a dozen Franklin County Fiddlers from Mt. Blue High School.
Family, friends, teachers, and her students came to honor Mills, 93, who died on Oct. 4. “She left quite a living legacy in her five children dedicated to public service,” said Rev. Kimberly Hoare. Mills’ five children: State senator and two-time gubernatorial candidate Peter Mills, who holds the longest overall Senate service; former state representative and currently Maine’s Attorney General Janet Mills; pediatrician and Maine Director of Public Health Dora Mills; attorney, local town meeting moderator, TV commentator and Maine historian Paul Mills and son David Mills were all raised primarily in Farmington.
She also left more than 5,000 students from the nearly 35 years of teaching high school English at Wilton Academy and Mt. Blue High School, in addition to other schools in the state early in her career.
All five of Mills’ children contributed to the service, according to her very detailed instructions of how her funeral service should be conducted, her daughter Janet Mills said. “It reads very much like an English teacher’s lesson plan. It has precise instructions for readings and even for what part of the aisle the hearing impaired should sit. It read like, “Roger, you play a song; David you read Tennyson’s ‘Ulysses,’; Janet, you read Thanatopsis; then everyone diagram the following ten sentences… Then correct the spelling of the following common words…And conjugate the verb “to be”—“I am, You are, He she it is, We all are and We will always be…” And then it says, “Have fun!”
Kay Mills’ instructions also included that the service should be upbeat and cheerful, which was carried out by Leila Percy & Friends who brought swing jazz to the old church’s nave. Percy, a state representative from District 64 and a bandleader vocalist said before leading the hymn, I’ll Fly Away, “she wanted it to swing so it will be a little faster than what you’re used to.”
Before reading Scripture, also as per Kay Mills instructions, Rev. John Tolman of Shorey Chapel in Industry where every once and a while Mills would attend, looked up and said, “I suppose she’s watching us now with red pen in hand.”
A four-year student of Mills at Wilton Academy who went on to teach English with Mills at Mt. Blue, Mary Sirios, told of Mills’ inestimable impact on the lives of thousands of her students. Mills, she said, demonstrated daily she was a lover of literature, the rules of grammar and her students.
“She expected the best from us everyday,” Sirois said. “We planned for our futures with Mrs. Mills.”
Dora Mills told of the traveling adventures she took as a teenager with her mother that included a cross-country trip to California by bus. That trip with her mother, Dora Mills said, taught her the importance of optimism, humor, to not be afraid to seek adventure and to continue on in a life-long journey of the heart.
And, “don’t forget to bring a good book and a deck of cards when you go,” she added.
Peter Mills remembered his mother as “first a teacher. There was home school on top of public school,” he said. The most powerful women in the 1950s taught school. “She recognized the power of teaching.”
Janet Mills said she had wondered what legacy her mother had left to her.
“I said to her, “Mother, I feel like I flunked womanhood… I can’t do any of those things other women seem to do…can’t embroider, quilt, sew, cook,… What exactly is it you’re leaving me?!” And she said softly, “Maybe just a sense of humor;…and perhaps that’s exactly what you’ll need.”
“Now I know what her legacy was,” Janet Mills said. “It wasn’t just a quilt or a pair of knitted mittens or a secret recipe for frogs legs, veal marsala or fish chowder. But, rather, a knowledge that you are loved.”
Read Kay Mills obituary here.
Editor’s note: Janet Mills’ remarks for her mother’s service are included in its entirety below:
Almost no one in my family is used to public speaking…So, my mother left a detailed plan for her funeral. It reads very much like an English teacher’s lesson plan. It has precise instructions for readings and even for what part of the aisle the hearing impaired should sit.
It read like, “Roger, you play a song; David you read Tennyson’s ‘Ulysses,’; Janet, you read Thanatopsis; then everyone diagram the following ten sentences… Then correct the spelling of the following common words…And conjugate the verb “to be”—“I am, You are, He she it is, We all are and We will always be…” And then it says, “Have fun!”
I think her goal in life was to make sure that everyone in western Maine could tell the difference between “principal” and “principle;” between “affect” and “effect.” And to avoid dangling participles at all costs. And she made that happen. You can’t walk down the streets of Farmington and talk to anyone who doesn’t know the difference between “it’s” and “its,” between “there” and “their,” or who can’t recite a couplet from Shakespeare right on cue.
I always wondered what my mother was leaving me… She was talented in many ways. But she didn’t knit, didn’t embroider or do crafts; didn’t quilt, didn’t like to sew and wasn’t a gourmet cook… I remarked on this at June Cayford’s wake a few years back. I said to her, “Mother, I feel like I flunked Womanhood… I can’t do any of those things other women seem to do…can’t embroider, quilt, sew, cook,… What exactly is it you’re leaving me?!” And she said softly, “Maybe just a sense of humor;…and perhaps that’s exactly what you’ll need.”
Now I know what her legacy was:
It wasn’t just a quilt or a pair of knitted mittens or a secret recipe for frogs legs, veal marsala or fish chowder. But, rather, a knowledge that you are loved.
Anthony, Julia, Wyatt, Hayden & Zach—this is the greatest gift a grandparent or a parent can give you, as my grandfather gave me before he died when I was eleven-the knowledge that you are always loved, that you are lovable and capable of giving love yourself.
She also left us a willingness to stick your neck out for other people.
A desire to speak well, write well and communicate directly and effectively, not just for your own sake, for you to be heard, but to speak for others too. She taught us all a desire to communicate, to read, write and understand poetry and plain old English, a desire that elevates our lives as it elevated hers, whether we are rich or poor, Republican or Democrat, rural or urban, male or female, young or old.
My Mother grew up along the banks of the beautiful Aroostook River, a river that cuts an “S” through the middle of the County, binding the woods lands of the Ox Bow and the rich potato lands of Ashland and Presque Isle, Caribou and Fort Fairfield, and on into Canada.
Later she raised her family here along the banks of the lovely Sandy River, which draws from the Rangeley Lakes and drains into the mighty Kennebec.
She grew up before the days of television, computers, cell phones, Blackberries, Ipods and Internet. But she did have books and a brain and a good work ethic.
Instead of People’s Magazine, CNN and Fox Noise News, we had paper routes, National Scholastic, diaries, National Geographic, visits from Margaret Chase Smith, classic books and encyclopedias, and “Thirty Days to a More Powerful Vocabulary”…
On the night she died, I felt the blood rush from the hands that held me at birth:
The hands my grandparents warmed and taught on a farm for 18 years;
Hands that parted and swam the Aroostook River in the spring;
Hands that gathered food in the desperate times of a Great Depression;
Hands that anxiously waited, moving the radio dial when a wartime President spoke warm words before a winter fire;
Hands that hugged a sailor home from war-torn seas, two small boys in tow;
The hands that held my father’s for so many years.
The hands that always held a book, often reading to a child;
The hands that combed my hair, that fed my mouth and taught my mind;
The hands that opened mailgrams postmarked from Japan from a son patrolling the dangerous shores of Vietnam;
Hands that wrote loving words in the smallest handwriting, somehow conscious of her space;
The hands that came across some white go-go boots in the back of my old closet, then sent them to me suggesting I might need them over the winter…
Hands that held the phone and fretted when calls went unanswered;
Hands that covered her mouth at my awful jokes;
Hands that grasped a tennis racket at age 65, and played a decent doubles game for 23 years thereafter;
Hands that hugged me at my wedding, and cheered me proudly when I was sworn in to my present job;
Hands that pampered many grandchildren over 42 years;
Hands that played a little ragtime on the piano;
Hands that granted forgiveness when all was forgotten;
Hands that opened so many doors, that raised so many windows to our worlds;
Hands that wrote poems on a chalk board every working day;
Hands that led a class in calisthenics while preparing for the SATs…
My mother taught for almost 35 years—two semesters each, 20-25 students in a class. That’s nearly 5,000 people who had her as their teacher. There’s a terrific ripple effect from a career like that, an effect on people for decades to come.
Now every day I drive to work the back way along the McCrillis Corner Road, Chesterville Road, Route 2, and Route 27 to the State Capital. I drive along this bend in the Sandy River, the undamed river that changes every year, that sharpens the corners of our roads, that wets the culverts and threatens the pastures every spring.
And just at that crook in the river before it hits the bridge at the Falls, I always see this large branch jutting out of the water, right in the middle, leaning into the flow, catching the fast current. A limb that’s still attached to some great sunken tree that just won’t let it go.
It is always there, even after the spring freshet. That limb makes all the difference to that river. Before that branch, anchored deep in the gravel, the water runs even and uneventfully. But that branch changes the course of those currents. Some go left, some slightly right; some swirl in confusion, then gather at the eddy on the far shore and then go on. But they are all diverted, changed for the better.
It’s there every day that I think of my Mother. I think how a good teacher—and a good parent, a good citizen-can change the course of a life and send young people on a long productive adventure, a life of good works.
And I thank God that my mother changed the course of so many lives, including my own, and those of the nearly 5,000 students she taught.
Except for her, I and many others might be stuck in sand, never changing a difficult direction. Instead we have found our course. That course is true. That course is good, despite some rough and unexpected waters.
If I can make that kind of a difference in people’s lives, I will honor you, my Mother, my grandparents and my community.
I know it’s unseemly for a public official to appear in public and say words like, “I love you.” But today I am not an attorney general. I am a child, perhaps for the last time in my life. And today I say, “I love you, Mother. And I thank you.”
And may you use that pole in the river, that spiritual rudder, to divine the aquifers of Heaven, to find their headwaters, to lead your students through the rivers and oceans of that other world as surely and securely as you did here below.
God bless you, my Mother. And God rest your soul.
