Lou Ann E. Berardi

Lou Ann was born on January 2, 1931, in Mount Morris, Illinois. She graduated with a bachelor's degree from Mills College in Oakland, CA in 1952, obtained a teaching credential from San Francisco State University in 1953, and earned a master’s degree in history from Cal State Berkley in 1955. She worked as a teacher for 45 years until retiring in 2000 to pursue her passion for writing, completing a book of essays and a book of poetry.

Lou Ann is survived by her four children Joseph Berardi, Maria Carroll, John Berardi, and Philip Berardi, eight grandchildren Christina, Caroline, Angie, Danielle, Jeremy, Ransom, Joseph, and Giovanna and three great-grandchildren.

Funeral Services will be on October 13th, 2022, at Eternal Valley Memorial Park and Mortuary in Newhall, CA at 1:00 pm in The Oaks venue with a reception to follow at 3:00 pm at the same venue.

In lieu of flowers, please consider a donation to one of the following charities: Reading is Fundamental (rifsocal.org); The Book Truck (thebooktruck.org); East Bay Children's Book Project (eastbaychildrensbookproject.org); Mount Morris Public Library, 105 S. McKendrie Ave., Mt. Morris, IL 61054. (Memorial gifts are matched up to $200 by the Mt. Morris Community Library Foundation).

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Eulogy for Lou Ann Berardi

Written by Maria Carroll

Good afternoon, I’m Maria, Lou Ann’s daughter. On behalf of my brothers, Joseph and John, and our families, I’d like to thank you all for being here today. We are truly grateful for your love and support and are pleased you are here to help us celebrate our Mom and the remarkable woman that she was.

Where to begin? There is so much I admired about Mom—it would take me days to recount but this afternoon I am going to focus on 4 key traits, her resilience, her love of books, her brilliant mind and incredible memory and her use of comfort rituals, a lesson I’ve been leaning on heavily these last weeks. Thanks Mom!

But first if I had to pick one word to define Mom it would be TEACHER. She was a teacher through and through–it’s all she ever wanted to be from a very early age. She devoted her life to learning and sharing her wisdom, not only with her students, but with everyone she came into contact with. She was a gifted teacher who formed extraordinary bonds with her students. In August of 2021, a student from her teaching days in North Dakota in the early 1970’s contacted her through Facebook and they corresponded up until a few months before her death. How remarkable! And this is just one of many such instances. Two of her former Loyola students are here today in fact, having flown in from the Bay Area. Thank you Eric and Vincent.

Although, I have so many wonderful things I could say about my mom, I think we can celebrate her best by hearing her own words, today. She published a book of essays in 2008 titled From the Corners of My Mind: Half a hundred random thoughts and memories, and I’m going to share some selections from her book so her voice can be part of this celebration of her life.

First and foremost, I admired Mom’s resilience—how she embraced each new challenge with determination to make the best of it. I remember when she made the decision to give up driving, she went and got the bus schedules and called to tell me she was excited for new adventures on the bus. She contemplates the origins of her resilience in her essay titled Transitions:

“I have had (as we all have) many changes in my life – some very small, some huge. But as I remember them, I think I have always reacted the same way – I did what I had to do and moved on. No time to cry forever over things that can’t be changed. My first conscious memory of this happened when I was nearly six years old. My mother had been diagnosed with tuberculosis in the summer of 1936, and in the fall she was to enter a sanatorium about a hundred miles from our small Illinois town. I was, of course, devastated. But my mother was very calm. I remember only three things. She marked my favorite stations on the radio dial and had a low rod put in the closet so that I could hang up my own clothes. And she told me we would again take long walks, look for wild flowers and read more books."

"But the day she left for the hospital was very strange, and I know my memory may not be accurate. I was left alone, but I seemed prepared for it, and I knew there were neighbors nearby. I remember getting up, finding my breakfast on the table and noticing how empty the house felt. I remember going to my “desk” at the living room windowsill and writing on my stationery my mother had given me. Half way through the morning I remembered that I had not combed my hair. I remember hurriedly combing it before anyone could see me. I guess I wanted to be responsible. I don’t remember being sad. I was just doing what I had to do.”

"Just four years later, my mother died, and of course, I cried and spent a lot of time wishing it weren’t so. I remember having to remind myself that she was gone and I would not see her anymore. I also remember how kind everyone was and how many people did special things for me. But the worst came just a little over a year later. That’s when I learned I would be moving to California to live with my dad and his wife. I would be leaving all my friends and relatives for a completely new world. I spent many hours just praying it weren’t so; the days of preparation are a blur now. I only know I kept firm hope that it would never happen. But I also remember as my things were loaded in the car and we were headed for California that my dad had planned an exciting trip, visiting Abe Lincoln’s home in Springfield, oil wells in Oklahoma, Indian reservations, the Grand Canyon, ghost towns and orange groves. All new things whose wonders I could only have imagined."

"These are my remembered impressions of only two transitions that I had to make when I was very young. ….Later whether it was moving across country with four children, losing my husband, being on my own again after nearly 40 years, leaving a teaching job I loved and giving up my home to come to live with and care for my Mom, I seem to follow a similar pattern: wishing it weren’t happening, but then settling down to the task of putting my life in some sort of new order.”

As a mother and school counselor, I know how hard it is for most people to face change. Another wonderful passage that showcases Mom’s optimistic attitude comes from her essay Changes where she writes:

“It is not hard to smile at my bleary eyed reflection in the mirror each morning. I really do look awful with the prospect of another bad hair day, wrinkles and bags. Yet my image smiles back at me and I could be 21 again. As Emily Dickinson says, “There stirs the culprit life.” The adventures of the day are still ahead.”

I hear her voice so clearly in that passage and I can’t help but smile.

Now, we can’t talk about mom without talking about her love of books and reading. This started at a very early age—she recounted many times how she couldn’t wait to learn how to read. She told us a story about running home from school when she was five years old shouting, “I can read, I can read”! Then sitting down to read a book cover to cover to her mother all the while holding it upside down. She had simply memorized the entire story!

Mom had vivid, fond memories of the library in her small town of Mt. Morris. In her essay titled The Old Sandstone, she writes:

“In the 1930’s the first floor housed the town’s public library, my special haven. Walking in the front door and through the small foyer with twin banister staircases on each side was like leaving the real world behind. A red rug led straight to the librarian’s desk, passing rows of dark oak tables and chairs. Lighting fixtures hung from the ceiling, but the real light came from the amber glow of reading lamps and the tall windows. The quiet enfolded everything in a cocoon of comfort. Life moved in slow motion here."

"I remember exactly how the library smelled at different times of the year. In the summer it was cool and dark, the windows shuttered against the heat but not the scent of the mock orange. In fall the musky smell of newly raked maple leaves hung in the air. Warm steam greeted us in the winter as we stomped out of our boots in the foyer and opened the library door. But spring was best of all. The damp smell of earth and new grass made dreaming easy, and rain made it even more wonderful.”

This past July Mom shared a memory with me that I had not heard before. In the summer that her mother passed away, her high school aged neighbor and friend, Lois, took her to the Mt. Morris library where she checked out The Disappearance of Anne Shaw which sparked her life-long love of mystery stories. I went on Amazon that very afternoon and was able to purchase a copy of that book…a very well-worn copy with a faded red cover and yellowed pages, published in 1928, but it’s a special addition to my library that I will treasure.

Mom had a brilliant mind and an incredible memory. I was always amazed when she would tell a story about something that happened in her childhood and could recall all the details including what she was wearing. For example, in an essay about her Grandmother’s house she wrote:

“I can’t remember how old I was when I first became aware of “my home”, but I must have been two going on three. It was winter, snow was on the ground and I was wearing my navy blue snowsuit.” I remember my mother and I were out taking our usual evening walk in the snow, one of our favorite activities, and she stopped to chat with a friend who asked how old I was. I can still hear her answer: “She’ll be three in January.”"

Wow! Such an incredible memory like no one else I have ever met…except perhaps, now her granddaughter Giovanna, who at three years old is already showing signs of an exceptional memory just like her grandma.

Another trait I admired about Mom was her ability to elevate the ordinary through the use of comforting rituals. I’d like to read you a wonderful essay she wrote entitled Comfort.

“When I think about what comforts me, I really don’t know which way to turn. I have so many little comfort rituals that my husband, Vito, used to say I qualified as a card carrying hedonist. And any little suggestion sends me off in search of a comfort ritual. Just thinking about writing this, sent me off to “comfort” myself with homemade macaroni and cheese with Waldorf salad."

"Many of these comfort rituals originated in childhood. I believe my mother was a great believer in being comfortable and doing things that made her happy. Fortunately, she passed many of these on to me, and I have written about them. But I can take credit for my share, too. Doing dishes, lighting a candle for my dinner table, keeping fresh flowers in the house – all of these are rituals that make me happy and give me a sense of place.

But one ritual has a long history. I remember as a child of perhaps seven or eight wandering over the cold dead garden late one November day. It was cold, the sky was gray, the air was still and time seemed suspended. I remember pausing under the grape arbor and feeling an overwhelming sadness I couldn’t identify. I remember sitting on the bench and taking in that whole sad world for a long moment before I sought out the warmth and comfort of my grandmother’s kitchen."

"This feeling of sadness would return to me each fall, and I would try to explain it to others, but I could give no reason for my feelings and no one understood. It was the way the world looked to me. It didn’t happen every day and I couldn’t figure out what determined it. So as I was growing up I coped in many different ways: retreating to the library to read, lighting a fire in the fireplace, having a cup of tea, making soup for dinner. Nothing seemed to work because I needed to understand what was going on. Then in my early twenties, I came upon a poem by Emily Dickinson. Sure enough, she knew what I was talking about. I could breathe a sigh of relief."

“There is a certain slant of light,

On winter afternoons,

That oppresses, like the weight

Of cathedral tunes.

“Heavenly hurt it gives us;

We can find no scar,

But internal difference

Where the meanings are.”

"Now when I feel one of those days coming on, when the light has a certain slant in the late afternoon, I come home as soon as I can, put on the tea kettle, close the drapes, light a fire if I have a fireplace and make myself tea in my favorite tea pot, drink it in one of my favorite cups, cuddle up in my favorite chair and simply enjoy how warm and cozy I am.”

As we say goodbye to Mom, I take great comfort in her words from her essay, Time and I hope you will too:

“This gift of time also allows me to look back over my life, reflect upon people and places that have shaped the person I have become. It makes me aware that I am growing older and that I will not live forever, yet this does not make me sad or frighten me because I know that I am only one small part of a greater cycle of life. We all touch lives as we move through our years, and those interactions no matter how small or large, easy or difficult, gentle or heavy ensure our existence past our allotted span of time. As Clarice Pinkola Estes says, “We stand on the shoulders of those who have gone before.” I will not continue to exist in linear time as the entity Lou Ann Elizabeth Smith Berardi, but my actions and ideas will perhaps become memories for others in this continuing journey called life.”

Well, Mom, your actions and ideas are our treasured memories. You made a difference in so many lives. Your legacy will live on in all those you touched and you will remain forever in our hearts.