She would have been 94 today. Here is what she was like in one word: vulnerable. She was very beautiful when she was young, and because she was always seeking acceptance and love, the wrong sorts of men were attracted to her. She was hurt repeatedly. Her mother never loved her. I think that her mother hadn’t wanted another child so soon after the birth of her first, and so she was not welcome. Her mother always felt guilty about that, and people don’t like innocent people who make them feel guilty. Many people hated Christ for the same reason.

Assigned by the matriarchal arbiter the “unfavored” status in the family from the beginning, she lived a life deprived of acceptance and love forever after—but she never stopped trying to gain their acceptance, and the more she tried, the more she was rejected. (People don’t like feeling guilty.) Like the child she was, she never stopped trying to understand what she’d done wrong. She also never stopped forgiving.

At some middle point in her life, she did stop trying, having internalized her unworthiness, and accepted the status she’d been assigned, and thereafter she accepted with gratitude the crumbs of acknowledgement her siblings gave her out of a sense of filial duty. She didn’t fight the situation any more but submitted to it—and she continued loving them. Not being loved does not keep some people from loving—people like her (and like Christ). She did this, she lived her life like this, because she was favored—though I think neither she nor her family would ever understand that.

As for me, I am not at all like her. Unlike her, I grew up very beloved by my mother. And thanks to her, I learned how—without knowing what I’d learned. I used to be surprised to discover that so many people didn’t know how—and didn’t know why they didn’t know how. (They didn’t have an example like her.) They engage instead in some variation of emotional bartering, the purpose of which is to find a kind of security niche, and they seldom encounter the real thing, unconditional, sacrificial—and fraught with vulnerability. I think that’s why they’re always drawn to great tragic romances like Romeo and Juliet. They experience what they think is love vicariously and purge themselves of pity and fear—of love.

But if you want to know what wealth is, don’t ask the rich man. Ask the beggar.

I believe the saints would agree that the greatest saints are those whose names we’ll never know, people who lived and loved and died unknown, unrecognized, invisible among us. One of them is Lois Inez Nelson.

Happy birthday, Mother.