Our mother was one of the few genuinely good people we’ve ever known. She was capable of both delivering and experiencing immense joy, and served as both our light and our glue. She gloried in her family and friends. She was too young and too good for this. She deserved more peace and happiness – and less difficulty – than was afforded to her over the years.

Our mother will become greater than all of us, and she lived as the best among us. She will not just be a mother or wife or sister or grandmother that died. Because of her, families that had been somewhat estranged by distance and time and difficulty became a single large unit – she was our matriarch, and her iron will forged us into something greater than we were, multiple threads of family woven into one. She was our historian, and her stories and hard-bitten memories of a tough early life informed us of a world we otherwise could not have imagined. She grew up in hard times and then ensured that we never wanted for anything.

She was our mother, and in that role we could not have asked for a better or stronger woman. She did everything she was supposed to do and more – she took care of us when we were sick, celebrated our victories, comforted us in defeat, punished severely those that dared harm us, and pointed us – rather firmly at times – in what was inexorably the right direction.

She was a big sister to our Aunt Vicki, and despite lives that took divergent paths, they maintained a close relationship over the years and helped each other through hard times. She loved her niece Cheyenne and her nephews Travis and Heath dearly, and counted their father Jeff and stepfather Randy among her close friends.

She was a wife to our father, Gary, whom she’d known since she was very young, and before my brother and I came along they cared for 42 foster children. Their long friendship made them wonderful parents and helped forge the people my brother and I would become, in all we know about right and wrong and how to live a life worth living. In these more recent years, our mother and father grew closer than ever and our mother adored Tammy, our stepmother. They joined forces in arranging and managing my wedding day, and have more or less been sisters ever since.

She was a wife to our stepfather, Leo, and this was a gift to us as much as to herself. Leo is an amazing man, and like our mother, he is pure of heart and selfless. We are honored to know him and proud and thankful to have his love. Our mother was happy with him, and the beautiful life they built together was good for all of us. Leo is our blood now, as is his entire family, all of whom loved my mother with abandon. We have all been drawn to the same tribe, called and initiated by her. We’ll wear those marks forever, and we are better for it.

After all that she was and is, our mother has one more role to play. She will become our ancestor, and it is that becoming over which we stumble now. We will someday do our best to honor her with the dignity and integrity and grace and utter selflessness that defined her and that we have tried so very hard to learn. Our best hope in life is to emulate her brilliance and give of ourselves to others as purely as she always did. We will tell our children about her and they will know her name, and who she was, and what she means to us.

But that peace is not within us now. There is no quiet where we are. Our well is dry, and the buckets come back up empty. Now we choose to scour our hearts, and we scour them with grief.

We feel that it is acceptable to admit our grief because our mother admitted her grief to us, showing us that it is unavoidable and a path in life that must be walked. Years after her own mother died, she burst into tears telling us about how badly it hurt, and how much she missed her. She was destroyed by the death of her father, Richard, the pain of which we all feel deeply still. She felt this grief so keenly because she loved so deeply; and as we loved her so deeply, so too are we brought low by this unbelievable, crippling pain. We are wounded; the well is dry; we scour our hearts.

But even as we grieve we are thankful for so many things. We are thankful that our mother essentially picked our wives – two more things she was right about – and adored them so much. We are thankful that, in no small part because of our mother’s will, we have such a large and loving family. We are thankful that within the core of our family, we have had no outstanding estrangements, no resentment, no bad feelings. We all love each other; what’s more, we all like each other.

We are thankful that our mother taught us to love each other in a way that made getting through this possible. And I think, most of all, we are thankful for our mother’s humor. Our mother’s wit was bone dry and her comic timing was wonderful, and if either of us have a gift for making people laugh, we inherited the execution and craft of it from her.

She maintained her sense of humor even throughout her sickness. I am not fabricating the following tale one bit: as Leo and my brother and I were arranging her sheets after we’d brought her home, she grimaced after being lifted. My brother said, “Hang in there, Mom, we just have one more sheet to go. You’re doing great.” She slowly raised one hand, smiled, and flipped us off.

Later, as we feared the end and gathered around her, I told her that we all loved her, and that if she wanted to go, it was okay. She looked right at me, cocked an eyebrow, and said “Joshua, I will not be pushed.” Though we all laughed and she smiled again, I am quite certain that she meant it.

We tell you now that our mother was a saint, and that her only fault was giving too much of herself. As her sons, we have tried to do right by her and become worthy of the upbringing she worked so hard to give to us. As we were faced with difficult news and tough decisions in recent days and weeks, we knew that above all else she wanted to be at home when she died, and we fulfilled that wish.

In the end, she went home. Soon we will give her to the earth and wind and water. It was better for all the world when she lived and walked among us, and the land will know when she returns to it. But in the end, she went home, and when she got there she was happy and peaceful.

As for us, it is hard. It is hard to be left behind. It is hard to be the ones who stay. And it is okay to admit that it is hard, because telling all of you how hard this is for us brings us together in honoring her, even if we must do it in short and simple words. We call to her by all of her names – Donna Paulette Peck; Donna Paulette Berthume; Donna Paulette Peltier. We love her, and she loved us. This is hard. This hurts.

As our mother taught us to be strong, she expects us to carry on, and so we will. We will be okay. We will fill up again. But for now, the well is dry, and the buckets come back up empty. Now there is no quiet where we are. Now we scour our hearts.

I was On The Road last week, going to Obama’s inauguration and writing a story for the Quorum Report. You have to subscribe to read it, but after the run is over I will reproduce it here.

This is a picture of what used to be Marine One but wasn’t when former President Bush rode in it on the way to boarding Air Force One. The whole trip was a wild ride, and I’m going to have plenty to say about it here in the coming days.

And I’m glad to be home, but the trip didn’t quell that thing inside that needs to travel and observe and relate. I think it only made it worse.

Outside Obama’s economic policy speech in Toledo, Ohio.