On last night’s Colbert Report, host Stephen Colbert opened his show with a moving tribute to his mom Lorna Colbert, who passed away a week prior at the age of 92.
During the emotional eulogy, Colbert often became overwhelmed as he told his viewers a little bit about the woman who shaped so much of who he is. While he spoke, a montage of images of Lorna Colbert were shown.
I recently lost my mother and I found myself crying right along with Stephen as his recollections of his mom, and his outward grief over his family’s loss, closely resembled my own. Here’s the video followed by the complete transcript in case you’re unable to watch where you’re at.
I’ve been away from the Report for a week because one week ago today my mother, Lorna Tuck Colbert died. And I want to thank everybody who offered their thoughts and prayers.
Now if you watch this show and you like this show that’s because of everybody who works here and I’m lucky to be one of them. But when you watch the show if you also like me, that’s because of my mom. So before we start the show again I would like to tell you a little bit about her.
She was born just a little ways from here in Larchmont, New York on Chatsworth Avenue in 1920, the same week that women first got the right to vote. She spent her summers in the Adirondacks with her older sister and her younger brother Ed who called her “Snodgrass.”
She met my father James at age 12 and she liked him, but she didn’t want him to know how much so she would make her friends ride their bikes all the way across town just to pass by his house but then she would never look to see if he was in the front yard, which of course, drove her friends crazy and evidently she also drove my father crazy because they were married and promptly had 11 children.
She made a very loving home for us. No fight between siblings could end without hugs and kisses. Though hugs never needed a reason in her house. Singing and dancing were encouraged except at the dinner table. She had trained to be an actress when she was younger and she would teach us how to do stage falls by pretending to faint on the kitchen floor. She was fun.
She knew more than her share of tragedy, losing her brother, and her husband and 3 of her sons but her love for her family and her faith in God somehow gave her the strength to not only go on but to love life without bitterness. And to instill in all of us a gratitude for every day we have together. And I know it may sound greedy to want more days with a person who lived so long but the fact that my mother was 92 does not diminish it only magnifies the enormity of the room whose door has now quietly shut.
In her last days my mother occasionally became confused and to try to ground her we ask simple questions like ‘what’s your favorite color,’ or ‘what’s your favorite song’ and she couldn’t answer these. But when asked what her favorite prayer was she immediately recited child’s prayer in German, that she used to say to my eldest brothers and sisters at bed time when they were living in Munich in the late 1940’s.
Her favorite memory of prayer was a young mother tucking in her children. We were the light of her life and she let us know it til the end.
