Rock of Ages, cleft for me, let me hide myself in thee
Remembering Colleen Anne Clifford Barnett on the 100th anniversary of her birth
Colleen Ann (Clifford) Barnett, passed peacefully on December 13, 2020, at Cerenity Senior Care in St. Paul, Minnesota at the age of 95. Colleen Barnett was born on February 22, 1925, in Green Bay, Wisconsin, to Gerald F. and Mae (Heney) Clifford. She attended the University of Wisconsin and the UW Law School, where she met her future husband, John Barnett. They married on May 21, 1949, in Green Bay, and settled in Boscobel, Wisconsin. Barnett worked for Grant County Social Services for fourteen years. Barnett then returned to the UW Law School and completed her law degree in 1990. After her husband's death in 2004, Barnett moved to St. Paul to be near her daughters. Funeral arrangements are on hold at this time. Interment will be at the Boscobel Cemetery. In lieu of flowers, please send donations to InHealth Community Wellness Clinic, 109 East Bluff Street, Boscobel, Wisconsin, 53805.
Family and friends will be gathering to celebrate the life of Colleen Ann (Clifford) Barnett at 10:30 a.m. on Saturday, July 31, 2021 at the Corpus Christi Catholic Parish (formerly Immaculate Conception), located at 405 E LeGrand Street in Boscobel. All are welcome.
My Mom died during COVID but not from COVID. Still, COVID dominated and dictated her final days, leaving many of her children — my wife and I included — with the jarringly dimmed memory of seeing her on her death bed while we were encased in protection medical gear.
[Side note: the flashback scenes in “The Pitt” on Max where Dr. Robby is remembering the loss of his mentor and he feels helplessly entrapped in all that protective gear and unable to stop his beloved’s death spiral … are quite triggering for me, even a half-decade later.]
I remember being so angry at the whole thing (and everyone involved) of Mom being reduced to this Andromeda Strain/Contagion-like send-off when it wasn’t even her story!
The upside? She drifted off into death in the slowest, quietest, most inexorable manner possible. Mom really feared death-the-process, even as her faith allowed her great anticipation of rejoining her husband (my Dad John) and her two dead babies (David and Michael).
So at least she was granted that calm ascent. And I got to hold her still-warm hand and kiss her still-warm forehead and stroke her white hair in a moment I found so profound and moving that, on our way out of the hospital that night in Minnesota (it felt like the place was abandoned, oddly enough), I turned to Vonne, my spouse, and said something to the effect of, Man, I really need to call Mom and tell about this amazing experience we just had … only to realize that call had already been made.
Imagine my gratitude, in that moment, to be walking out of that hospital arm-in-arm with the woman who effortlessly absorbed that role upon my Mom’s passing.
That is good fortune of the highest order — something I wish for anyone and everyone because I know, through my wife’s brutally meaningful work as a hospice social worker, so many depart this world without such closure or connection, oftentimes leaving behind loved ones incredibly damaged by the loss.
Now, when I think of Mom and miss her, I am at peace. There is no Mom that could have meaningfully made it to this moment in history.
Indeed, almost to the day, two years prior to her death, as I sat with her in her apartment (assisted living), she told me, having given up on her last project (a biography of Upton Sinclair) because of her failing eyesight, that I’m going to go two more years and then that’s it!
She actually said that, not as a prediction but as a decision.
And then, that is exactly who she was and what she did those last 24 months before leaving on her own terms — if fatefully isolated from the touch of others in her last days (where my regret lies waiting silently for me).
My Mother was my God, my Christ, and my Pope — the earthly representation of everything I knew and believed in. The immediacy of that bond shaped my entire existence: I felt God’s presence every waking moment and throughout my dreams.
I know it sounds almost idolatrous, from a Catholic perspective, but that’s what she was to me: approval, forgiveness, punishment, and boundless love. I have moved confidently through my life due, first and foremost, to that beginning — that upbringing by her and my Dad.
Mom remains all those things in my head; I’ve just transferred all that connection to my spouse now (again, lucky me).
Whenever I tire of being a parent, I reach for that inheritance within me, knowing just how important my continued existence is to my kids. My parents’ example, in this regard, is a power far beyond mere memory — far beyond the grief that I have been able to release in the time since and yet gladly welcome on this day.
Give is the price we pay for love, as the quote goes.
And I gladly pay that price today.
Below find my eulogy to Colleen Anne Clifford Barnett. I modeled it on the one I wrote for my Dad:
The postponed Q&A will appear Monday, while I’m on travel.
Delivered 31 July 2021 at Immaculate Conception Parish, Boscobel Wisconsin.
On behalf of my family, I want to thank you all for joining us here to celebrate Colleen Ann Clifford Barnett. This space is — without a doubt — the spiritual center of gravity for our family, and you, her family and friends, are all she would have asked for today.
Our mother was born in Green Bay and grew up as Packer royalty thanks to her father’s seminal role in that franchise. The Packers were everything to Mom and, on that basis, remain everything to her family.
An example: my wife Vonne and I switched faiths for a time, during which we baptized our second child Kevin as Episcopalian. Mom attended but wept openly during the entire ceremony. On the way out she fiercely hugged me and declared, “It could have been worse, Thomas."
"How?" I said.
She replied, "You could have become a Bears fan.”
Colleen Clifford met and fell in love with John Barnett, her husband of more than 50 years, at the University of Wisconsin law school. Upon their marriage, she left law school – hold that thought — and moved with John to Boscobel.
Colleen bore John 9 babies in 15 years — a testament to her love of children, physical endurance, and, as she liked to brag over the years, her profoundly loving relationship with our Father.
Mom was a fiercely protective parent, and her feats of strength were legend within our family. Once, during a hot summer mass in this church, we were sitting in the last row to accommodate Mom’s weakened state — as she had just been released from the hospital following surgery. Our sister Maggie, feeling dizzy from the heat, got up to go to the bathroom. On her way, she bumped into the holy water tank, alerting Mom, who immediately vaulted over the pew and caught Maggie before she hit the ground!
As Colleen’s last child entered grade school here, she joined Grant County’s social services department, where she helped establish many important programs that persist to this day.
Retiring at 62, our mother was re-admitted to the UW law school, becoming a genuine celebrity among her classmates. There was a longtime UW law professor who — as legend had it — had never been bested by any student in a mock cross-examination — until Colleen.
Now imagine being 19 years old and entering our living room at midnight with … something … on your breath — only to see Mom squinting at you from her recliner. Like that professor, you never really had a chance.
After law school, Colleen spent a decade working as a lawyer, divorce mediator, and instructor at UW Richland Center.
If that wasn’t enough, Mom began her writing career in her seventies, methodically authoring the definitive three-volume encyclopedia of leading women characters in mystery fiction — triggering her celebrity within that literary circle, to include nominations for industry awards and presentations at national conventions.
Mom had an incredible drive and boundless curiosity — all of which she imparted to her children and this community by serving on boards, commissions, and councils.
Mom was brilliant at organizing things and people, setting goals, and motivating action. "Make your life an adventure," she would tell us. "Never regret your failures, for they are the making of you."
True to form, Mom constantly experimented as a parent, making us in the process.
An antique cow bell called us home for dinner, on time and salivating like Pavlov's dogs.
Reading lights clipped to our beds made us all avid readers.
Our childhood was a never-ending series of challenges, competitions, and tests. I was introduced to public speaking well before kindergarten, thanks to Mom’s question of the day at our dinner table each night. The Barnett kids had to speech for their supper.
Tie your shoes for the first time? $5 from Mom.
Ride your bike — no training wheels — around the block without stopping? Another $5.
Let's be honest here: a lot of Mom's schemes were thinly devised efforts to get us kids out of the house. Her favorite way to dismiss us was to bark, "Now get out of here!"
When our brothers — first Andrew, then Jim, ultimately Ted — were diagnosed with dyslexia, thanks to Mom's persistence at a time before learning disabilities were even recognized, she had numerous experimental devices built to exercise their hand-eye coordination. Mom made those drills seem so cool that neighbor kids would line up to do them. To this day I brag about almost being dyslexic — I was this close to getting that badge!
Mary Poppins had nothing on Mom.
After Dad died, Mom left Boscobel to live with our sister Maggie in St Paul. There, she became in-house grandma to Maggie’s daughter Ally.
That transition softened up Mom quite a bit, but she was still Mom. Every year I’d get this gloriously worded birthday card: you are the best son in the world, and so on. Then I’d glance down and see, in her handwriting: “Don’t let it go to your head! …. Love, Mom.”
We'd ask Mom, "Who's your favorite child?" She'd reply, "The one who needs me most right now" — a promise she always kept.
It has been an incredible privilege to have Colleen in our lives all those 95 years — a blessing beyond calculation.
And so, I ask for your continued prayers — not for Mom and her soul; trust me, God skipped that cross — but for whatever you hold most dear and for our world at large. Nobody believed more in prayer than Colleen.
Every child grows up thinking that the world is just like their family.
All I can say, in conclusion, about Colleen Ann Clifford Barnett, is that she left her 7 surviving children — and by extension her two dozen grand and great-grandchildren — a wondrous, beautiful, adventure-filled world where parents live for children, marriage is for life, and love is forever.
All this ... because two people fell in love.
Mom, thanks for everything.
Dad, she's all yours.
Tom,
I remember them both well. Spent a lot of time there with Ted and Steve Wayne at the house. I actually went to law school with your mother! She was always interesting to talk to between classes.
Those days in Boscobel seem like a much simpler time looking back. I suspect without the internet and 24 hour news coverage, we didn’t know what was going on. Is ignorance truly bliss?
Condolences, Mr Barnett.
I've lost my mother, by a thread of hair short, just before the craziness took over the world (public isolation measures, rules of departure...), though it wasn't at all easy at all.
Same way as Alex Trebek...