MARY “LEE” GLENN (1940–2025)
By:
August 31, 2026
My mother, Lee Glenn, died this past year. Today would have been her 86th birthday. My brother and I wrote and delivered Mom’s eulogy — in March, at King’s Chapel in Boston — together. Here it is…
JOSH: Welcome, everyone. Thank you all so much for coming. We’re Lee’s sons. I’m Josh.
PAT: And I’m Pat. The morning I got the call that Mom passed away, Josh was staying at my house. I shook him awake and told him, “Mom is gone”. His immediate response was: “Well, I guess we’re orphans now.”
JOSH: Sorry Dad.
PAT: Our first phone call that day was to Mom’s friend Judy Wright. Josh started to tell her the sad news but got too choked up to continue.
JOSH: So Pat took over but soon he was also too choked up to talk. And that made Judy cry harder. Given that scene, we decided it would be wise to do this together.
JOSH: Mom had a big heart, full of love. Our eulogy is a little tour of the things she loved the most.
PAT: That starts with us obviously. We were always a close knit tribe of three. Mom was “between husbands” for over 30 years, which encompassed our early childhood through the birth of 3 of her 5 grandchildren.
PAT: Growing up, we spent half of each week with Mom. We weren’t allowed to watch much TV, and for a long time we didn’t have video games or computers. Instead, we spent a lot of time out in the street with our neighborhood friends — many of whom also had divorced parents — on and around Park Lane. It was a large, close-knit community.
JOSH: Which was another of the things Mom loved — her friends on Park Lane and around Jamaica Plain, and stretching to Newton and Cambridge and beyond. She had friends everywhere, really. She developed wonderful, life long friendships from every era of her life — Bethel (Maine), Winter Park (Florida), Wheaton College, half a century in Jamaica Plain, and here at King’s Chapel.
PAT: In the late ’60s and early ’70s, some of Mom’s friends and their young families lived with us at Park Lane. Yes, it’s possible Josh and I were raised in a commune.
JOSH: By her example, Mom taught us how to be a good friend. She talked on the phone for hours with her friends. We celebrated holidays with them. They danced at our weddings. Her friends became our family.
PAT: In that spirit, going forward, Josh and I will be sending our Christmas wish-lists to Mom’s friend, Joan Soble. Thank you Auntie Joan.
JOSH: Mom also loved the farmhouse and lakeside cabin that her parents had acquired on Songo Pond near Bethel, Maine. We’d spent part of each summer there, swimming and roaming the woods, and spending the evenings playing Hearts and parlor games. Our friends and her friends came along with us, as well as Mom’s brother Butch and her cousin Gayle, and our cousins.
PAT: Songo Pond was a little utopia each August, and she presided over it – we realize now – with a lot of patience and hard work on her part. But Mom also loved to relax, and she was very good at it. She’d sit in the Adirondack chair on the farmhouse porch and just stare at the field across the road.
JOSH: One time Pat and I were exploring the woods for an entire day and when we came back she was still in the same chair. We said “What have you been doing all this time?” And she said “I think I saw a fox.”
PAT: As much as she loved Park Lane and Songo Pond, Mom also liked to travel. She took us on some memorable vacations, like the time we stayed on a working sheep farm in Scotland with The Wrights. Mom also took us to Winter Park Florida so we could see her childhood home and her high school — where she’d been a baton-twirling majorette.
JOSH: To be honest we were mostly interested in Disney World, a mysterious soft drink called Mister Pibb, and a theme park called Wet’n’Wild.
PAT: I got so sunburned at Wet’n’Wild that I had to sleep in the motel bathtub.
PAT: Mom always showed up for us. She came to every school play, and every bad music recital.
JOSH: And after Pat went away to boarding school she drove all over New England to watch him play football, basketball, and baseball. Oh, and she made sure — when Patrick was arrested by state troopers — to attend every one of his court dates too.
PAT: That was just a misunderstanding. Mom loved to watch Josh read, and play Dungeons & Dragons.
JOSH: No she didn’t, that’s not a thing.
PAT: Mom cared a lot about social justice. Growing up we attended community meetings and protests with her. Josh and Katie Horsley traveled by train with her to New York in 1982 for a massive protest against nuclear weapons. She told us to try to do a little good in the world. And in our everyday lives, she taught us to perceive everyone as equal.
JOSH: Although as a southern belle of sorts, she didn’t particularly like the term “feminism” she made it clear that in our household there were no “women’s roles” — the boys cooked and cleaned too.
JOSH: Mom taught us both how to drive. She was an excellent driver — very into shortcuts — also very into swearing.
PAT: Mom taught us a little about the birds and the bees. Which was traumatizing.
JOSH: She taught us about loyalty, generosity, and decency. And the Oxford comma.
PAT: She showed us how to be good parents.
JOSH: Mom loved her work. Over her long career as a therapist, she helped hundreds of people. All of us who knew her experienced this part of her life through her great listening skills, her compassion and empathy.
PAT: A former client of Mom’s recently wrote to us: “I loved Lee. I remember feeling that I was delighted in, truly seen, and enjoyed by my therapist.” Mom’s children, friends, daughters-in-law, and grandchildren felt exactly the same way. Oh, and that same client wanted us to know that she named her horse (Levi) after Mom.
JOSH: I guess that’s good?
JOSH: Mom loved our stepfather, Bernie. He was a kind man with a good heart and an active mind. He loved to talk about books and feelings. He wouldn’t entertain small talk. He showered Mom with affection.
PAT: Bernie and Mom watched her favorite TV shows, The West Wing and Blue Bloods over and over again, and played a never ending game of Gin Rummy. Bernie was a wonderful companion to Mom during the last 25 years of her life. We loved him for that.
JOSH: Mom loved being a mother-in-law. She adored Susan and Kate from the first time she met them — and became good friends with their mothers too. Her sometimes very long voicemail messages always began “Hi, it’s Mom / Lee” — she wanted our wives to know that she was reaching out to them too. Later she amended that to “Mom / Lee / Nonie” — which, for me at least, kind of became her actual name.
PAT: Mom loved music. She played piano and sang — at home, at holiday parties, with choral groups. She loved composing funny little songs for special occasions. Her favorite movies, Singing in the Rain and Sound of Music, were musicals. She had a great record collection. We learned many very interesting things from the soundtracks of “Hair” and the reggae classic “The Harder They Come”.
PAT: She loved it that all three of her grandsons play an instrument.
JOSH: Lila and Garet, it’s never too late.
JOSH: Mom loved to laugh. She had a terrific sense of humor and a loud, full-throated laugh that embarrassed us as kids — because we could hear her laughing, from our house, at parties across the street at the Horsley’s house — but we grew to love it.
PAT: On Tuesday nights after the 3 of us watched Laverne & Shirley, Josh and I would fall asleep to the sound of Mom laughing to the inevitable Three’s Company shenanigans. There was always laughter in our house — always. Not surprisingly, Mom’s sense of humor stayed with her right until the end, after so much else was gone.
JOSH: Mom loved to learn, and never stopped learning. She earned a PhD in psychology at the age of 50. An important family ritual was that she’d take us to WordsWorth in Harvard Square, and let us pick whatever book we wanted. When we helped move her out of the home where she’d lived for so long, she gracefully let everything go except for a few pieces of art by Judy Wright and Scott Ketcham and of course some of her favorite books.
PAT: Mom also loved the Red Sox. Some of my earliest memories are of her watching the Sox on the little TV in our kitchen. She kept up with them by reading the Globe Sports section, and at some point every season, Mom would proclaim: “Well, it doesn’t look good for our Red Sox”. But she never gave up on them. She was an eternal optimist….
JOSH: Which served her well in the last couple of years. In fact, when her ability to communicate became quite limited, the only thing she could say reliably was “yes, yes, yes.” Which tells you everything you need to know about her.
PAT: Mom loved the phrase “tuck into” — which she used instead of “duck into.” As in “I’m going to tuck into this store to look at the shoes” or “let’s tuck into the Parker House for a slice of Boston creme pie” or, her favorite, “I’m just going to quickly tuck into the ladies room”.
JOSH: Mom was thrifty. She loved a bargain. She made yard sales and thrift stores feel like an adventure. The only downside was that she wanted us to wear all the clothes she’d find. I’d say “Mom I’m not going to wear a purple sweater to school,” and she’d say, “But it’s Brooks Brothers! It’s cashmere! And it was only three dollars!”
PAT: Mom loved the pink bell bottoms she bought me in the 4th grade. I would throw them away at least one a week, and they’d miraculously re-appear, clean and folded, in my dresser.
JOSH: What Mom loved most of all, though, was being a grandmother to Max, Sam, Lila, Garet, and Emmett. As you have already heard, from some of her grandchildren today, she had very special relationships with each of them. When they were little she would have “playdates” with them and sleepovers at Park Lane. They played with Lego, they read books together. She never forced them to cook or clean, though — apparently that lesson was just for her sons.
PAT: She took them on trips to New York to see Broadway shows. She went on rides with them at Disney World. She swam with them in Songo Pond. She was a fixture at softball games, cross-country and track meets, high school jazz concerts, holidays, birthday parties, and graduations. She was fun and she gave the best hugs. Most importantly, their “Nonie” was a warm and supportive grandmother, who loved them unconditionally.
JOSH: We miss Mom / Lee / Nonie every day but she lives on in all of us.
JOSH: Here are some of the life lessons we learned from her: Be kind. Be authentic. Never drive past a yard sale without stopping. Take a stand against racism, sexism and bigotry. Be optimistic. Never stop learning. A preposition is not something you should end a sentence with.
PAT: Stand up for those who need help. Show up for the ones you love. Love the Red Sox even when they don’t love you back. Be a good listener. Be a good friend. Have a good laugh. And never, ever… pass up the opportunity to tuck into a bathroom.