Evan's Eulogy for Roberta Marcus, delivered 12/4/2020.

Mom is gone. She left us on Wednesday afternoon.

Note that I didn’t say “My Mom” or “Abby’s Mom,” I just said, “Mom”. One of her greatest joys was to simply be called Mom, not just by Abby and me, but by all of our friends. When we were in high school and college, she would never allow our friends to call her Mrs. Marcus or anything else. It had to be Mom.

Mom took great joy in being part of things. Feeling like she was one of the gang - and she was, in fact, part of the gang. She loved when we had parties at the house, she loved feeding everyone and posing with us for pictures and helping make the parties more fun. Whether it was an evening party in the living room or daytime in the backyard, Mom always encouraged us to have friends at the house, and to have a good time.

This led to my friends pitching in and doing stuff for her in return. You couldn’t really say no when Mom asked you to do something for her. One of the most memorable examples of that was our road trips for egg rolls. Sure, you can get egg rolls anywhere; Chinese restaurants are on every other corner. But Mom’s egg rolls could only come from one place: The China Chalet in Closter. It was a good 20 or 25 minutes away from our home in River Edge, but those egg rolls were worth the trip. They really were. We would grab Marcelo or Rob Wilen and make the drive and come home with a dozen or more frozen egg rolls at a shot, and have a mini-feast. Many of our friends still speak fondly about egg roll runs today.

When our kids were born, she insisted on being called Grandma Cookie. That was her way of remembering her beloved grandmother, Eva Bornstein, who I was named for. She adored her Grandma Cookie and wanted to make sure that we all remembered her as well.

You know how every day is some silly holiday, “National This Day” and “International Day of That”? Well, the first thing I heard when I came downstairs this morning was that today, December 4th, is National Cookie Day. So very appropriate.

Mom made friends very easily. She had friends all around town, whether the pharmacist, the lady at the bank, the cosmetics saleswoman, her doctors, or the guy who ran the greeting card store. She was never just going into a store to buy something, she went into the bank to see Pat and catch up. It was going to Saks to see Melva, and maybe buying some cosmetics along the way. She had a way of walking into a store as a customer and walking out as a member of the family. Just last week, I stopped at her pharmacy -- I had never been there before -- and all three people behind the counter made a point of telling me how funny and delightful and warm she was. I saw that from her all my life. She touched a lot of people. It makes me even sadder to think how many people wanted to be here today to remember her, but could not.

I think the two characteristics that most defined Mom were her love of doing things for other people, and her creativity. She was able to blend them very well. For many years, she would put together monthly bulletins for her local chapters of Hadassah and Deborah Hospital. She did this before computers, and so the bulletins consisted of a lot of rub-on letters, typing on real typewriters, and literal clip-art. She was cutting and pasting using actual scissors and real rubber cement. And of course, she was good friends with the guy at the print shop.

I could talk about her making adorable paintings for anyone she knew who had a baby or grandchild. Or the Jewish calendars that she designed over 50 years ago that she still hand-colored and gave out to religious friends. Or the hours and hours of work she did to support Dad’s optometric practice or his work for the Lions Club or for the Bergen Passaic Optometric Society. Or her annual hand-made and custom-designed holiday cards that her friends and family looked forward to each year. Or even her famous da-da da-da da-da poems.

But instead I want to talk about her necklaces. For many years, Mom has made beautiful custom necklaces from a variety of beads and semi-precious stones. She’d spend hours choosing the colors, the stones, and the layout, and the various combinations that go into each necklace, and hand-stringing and knotting each one. Every necklace is different from every other and they are genuinely unique, beautiful, and striking. What Mom was never good at was marketing. Of the more than 300 necklaces that she made, there are over 200 of them sitting in her apartment. Although she tried to sell them at first, she never really could. She preferred to give them away to friends or sell them at prices that did not cover her costs and certainly did not value her time. She took such joy in seeing people wearing them, and in the compliments that she got. That was the payback to Mom.

She took great pride in designing and hand-making the centerpieces for each of her five grandchildrens’ Bar and Bat Mitzvahs, and each was completely different from the other. For Hannah the gymnast, she hand-cut silhouettes of gymnasts from foam core. For Wendee the actress, she made themed centerpieces around Wendee’s favorite Broadway show, Wicked. For Jon the music-lover, she designed centerpieces focused on some of the most famous and beautiful classic rock album covers. For Michael, she wrote to comedians and got signed pictures from a bunch of them, including Adam Sandler and Billy Crystal, and built them into centerpieces. And of course, for Sarah, everything was Yankee themed.

Even for my Bar Mitzvah, back in 1975, when nobody had a themed Bar Mitzvah, I did. The theme was the Mets. She wrote to the Mets and got autographed photos of Tom Seaver and Bud Harrelson, and handmade a whole variety of blue and orange baseball themed stuff including matchbooks and the centerpieces themselves. I didn’t appreciate it at the time (doesn’t everyone’s Mom do this kind of stuff?), but looking back, I truly do. How could I not?

Her creativity came out in other ways as well. When I was in middle school, I made a series of short silly films with my friends. We called ourselves Aardvark Productions, and leave it to Mom to hand-paint a giant purple aardvark that we used at the start of every movie like MGM used Leo the Lion. And later, when I had the chance to be on the radio, she would call in to our call-in quiz shows, often more than once a show if we needed it, using a fake name, just to help and support us. She even designed custom t-shirts for the whole crew -- you couldn’t see them on the radio, but they made the show feel a lot more real and important.

One final area that was so important to her was music. When Abby and I were young, there were always Broadway show tunes playing in the living room. All the Rodgers & Hammerstein, Lerner & Loewe, and so many others. This led directly to my love for Broadway and musical theater. She has hundreds of LPs and CDs from Broadway and from crooners like Frank Sinatra and Tony Bennett in her apartment as well.

Wherever you are now Mom, I hope you’re able to make all the necklaces and paintings you want for everyone you meet, while you listen to show tunes, and munch on some egg rolls.