Remembering Bev

My heart goes out to the Stern family upon hearing of the passing of Bev — wife, mother, and grandmother, and adoptive mother of countless lucky people. She was the mother of my friend and college roommate Hal, and I met her during parents’ weekend of our freshman year at Princeton. She was one of those people with a smile that lights the world, and a warmth that makes you feel like she’s your Mom too. Fittingly, she was a school nurse for many decades, and I’m certain there’s a whole generation of kids who grew up in Freehold, New Jersey who think she’s their “other mother” too. She was a fount of boundless encouragement, her children’s greatest cheerleader, propelling her family to be both happy and highly accomplished through force of will, power of love, and no shortage of her famous kugel(*). She lead not just by encouragement but by example, being a strong and accomplished woman herself. Hal was not the first Ivy Leaguer in his family; she had graduated from Penn. And by the end of her school nurse career, she was leading the nursing program for the district and establishing best practices that were adopted statewide. In her later years, she was organizing things at the assisted living community that she and Joel had moved to. She was also social media savvy and doing her best to make Facebook a more benevolent place with her uniformly positive messages. While wholeheartedly Jewish herself, she was open-hearted to good people of all faiths, and always made a point to send out good wishes for Christmas and Easter and other religious holidays for all who observe. One of the silver linings of the Covid pandemic for me was that I was able to join the Stern family seder via Zoom where I was welcomed like family. In a beautiful funeral service this morning (which I was also able to attend thanks to Zoom), it was so moving to hear her children and grandchildren all remember her so vividly and lovingly. I loved seeing just how much of Bev lives on in them — the way they speak, the way they laugh, the way they support and hold each other up. I hope they draw comfort in those moments when they recognize a glimpse of the parts of her living on in themselves and each other. May her memory be a blessing to them and to all of us who knew her.

(*) Hal reminded us this morning that his mother’s kugel recipe was one of the first things to go viral on the Internet, more than 30 years ago, long before Google, Facebook, or any of that. Try Googling “Mom Stern’s noodle kugel”. It still comes up, just one indicator of her lasting positive impact on this world.