A video recording of this eulogy can be viewed here. Written eulogy with photos is below.

There’s no way to sugar coat it, my mum, Lorraine Beverly Cotter, had a hard life.

Born August 23^rd, 1956, to Sarah Schmidt and raised by both her mum and her steel working Uncle Bill, she was born and raised in a low-income home in Pittsburgh’s Knoxville neighborhood on Rochelle Street. One of eight children, she was a part of a large Catholic family, just like her husband Bryan was. She is survived by that loving, dedicated husband who took care of her to the very end, her four children (Faith, Joan, John and me), her unofficial extra sons (our friends Conner, Teagan, Dillon and Cory), her brother Larry, her older sister Sandra, and her younger sister Kim, our many cousins, and her closest friends (Diane, Kim and Debbie). She is preceded by her mum, her Uncle Bill, her brothers Gary and Norman, her sisters Lanie and Peggy, and the children that she lost.

Early on, my mum lost her biological father and her little brother. Throughout her life, she experienced additional significant losses, as siblings, other family members, friends, and more were taken away from her way too soon. Aside from losses, she also faced significant hardships, both within and outside of her home. Starting in early adulthood, my mum carried the enormous weight of multiple, life changing chronic health conditions. As a result, we almost lost her many times. She had so many surgeries, in fact, she became allergic to various types of anesthesia.

She lost several pregnancies. She cared for our younger brother during two bouts of cancer, accompanying him to every treatment and residing with him for every single hospital stay. The few out-of-state family trips we got to go on, because they were paid for by various organizations because John had cancer, are some of the only times my mum was able to leave the tri-state area, let alone Pittsburgh, with some exceptions before she had us. She also comforted me as I almost died twice as a teenager, both instances due to the same kind of medical neglect that she herself experienced time and time again.

She battled poverty our entire lives and the instability, toxic stress and humiliation that comes with it. As the weight of health issues like epilepsy, congestive heart failure, COPD, type 2 diabetes, immobility, diabetes induced blindness and more took their toll on her, she became increasingly isolated from the world and rarely was able to leave the house for years and years, though Facebook and the video game “Farmville” kept her connected to people from all over, at least when she could still see. If there’s a bad thing that could happen to a person, my mum probably experienced it. These experiences shaped who she was. And it would be untrue to say that these circumstances and their consequences did not also have an impact on my dad, my siblings, me and our extended friends and family. Because they did, tremendously so, both directly and indirectly.

And yet, she persevered and she persevered because she wanted to both care for and be with my dad, my siblings, our extended family and her friends. Never once complaining about the pain she endured, however intense.

Health issue after health issue, loss after loss, she survived. Always fighting for life.

On my mum’s side, she was the first to go to community college, wherein she studied to be an accountant. And because of the immense sacrifices that both her and my dad made for my siblings and me, Faith, Joan, John and I are the first college graduates in our immediate family and among the first on my entire mum’s side. After developing epilepsy, she could not work a traditional job, but she raised us.

Early on, her and my dad brought us here from the Hilltop to Brookline, so we could have a better life, years before Brookline Boulevard had these food tours that annoy the shit out of me. Brookline became her everything, as it did for my dad, my siblings and me. As evidence, all but one of us literally still call Brookline their home and our other sibling does so spiritually.

She was never afraid to bag and borrow if it meant keeping us fed, sheltered and clothed. If government programs weren’t enough or we were right above the eligibility cutoff, she would call everyone she knew for help, never too proud when it came to ensuring the material needs for her children were met. When our furnace died during a cold winter when we were kids, she managed to get us a new, free one but it was televised on KDKA, something that humiliated me at the time but now fills me with pride.

She was the woman who’d ask my dad to take us through the McDonald’s drive through to get 6 cups of ice water and the free ice cream samples they used to give out. When a cashier would occasionally resist, my mum said she was a, “paying customer”. As a family of 6, she’s also the woman who used to take us to Ponderosa Stake House on special occasions and proudly say, “we’ll take five ice waters and one Pepsi for the birthday boy.”

My mum was a force of nature. One that both created and destroyed.

A published writer, it was her gift of writing and “telling it like it is” that led all her children to become published writers themselves. Her first publication, a poem called “Raggedy An”, was a deep pride of hers.

With the camcorder gifted to us by a dear family friend, my mum documented moments of life around the house and in our yard, narrating the beauty she saw and wanting to leave her thoughts for us, just in case she passed away when we were kids. It’s the same camera my sisters used to film princess plays on and that John, Conner and I used to make deeply inappropriate short films with, including one we called “the 100 Acre Woods Massacre”, using ketchup for blood, baby powder for the explosions, the Titanic soundtrack for the vibes, and Winnie the Poo stuffies as the subjects. 

For better and for worse, she was the absolute epitome of, “do not go quietly into that good night”, someone who would kick your ass at a wedding if you said something wrong about her kids and one that kept fighting (literally) to the very end, waving and flailing her arms at nurses in the hours before she lost consciousness. That’s my mum.

When a man abused one of her sisters, back when my mum was just a teenager, she smashed up the guy’s beloved Gran Torino with a tire iron and, in a separate instance, threw a brick at him to stop him from beating on her sister, after which that same man turned around and hit my mum directly in the face with that same brick. A girl from Knoxville, my mum had grit and courage. That same courage got her through two medical comas and much suffering from chronic health issues and terrible, unlucky circumstances.

Having lived within low-income and working-class City neighborhoods her entire life, her Pittsburgeze made the Youtuber “Pittsburgh Dad” look like a suburban tourist from out of state.  Her sentences were less distinct words, per say, and more one giant slurring of those words together.

She and my dad endured my siblings and me being a huge pain in their asses in early childhood. Taking me on many a hospital visit because my best friend Conner accidentally threw me through a second story glass window when my brother, our friends and I would turn out the lights, put pillow sacks over our heads and run at each other at full speed at night in our room, not to mention the times that Conner accidentally stabbed me or accidentally got me hit by a moving vehicle. Thanks Conner.

My mum was the woman who annually blew up an inflatable swimming pool in our front yard on Rossmore with her breath alone. Apparently not being able to Layaway both the pool and an air pump, every summer she’d have her cigarettes in one hand and a diet Pepsi in the other and wouldn’t stop huffing and puffing until it was fully inflated. That’s both resilience, and love.

She changed the lyrics to the song, “You are My Sunshine” to make them more optimistic, changing the lyrics, “never take my sunshine away” to, “you will be my sunshine always.” To her, Faith was her Sunshine, Joan was her Rainbow, John was her Snowflake and I was her Moonlight. And we still have the notes you drew for us mum, the ones you used to put in our lunch boxes at school, an awkward heart with arms and legs, outstretched towards their children.

Though her nicknames for us sometimes proved confounding, albeit loving. Like the time Fr. Victor from Resurrection Church pointed out that my mum had once named us Sunshine Cotter, Moonlight Cotter, Rainbow Cotter and Snowflake Cotter in a public facing directory for elementary school, instead of using our real names. John’s nickname hasn’t aged too well in our modern political climate…

My mum was the one who painstakingly sought places for my dad and us that would become family traditions, from the former Riley’s Pumpkin Patch in the North Hills to the Christmas Tree farm in Monongahela and from Round Hill Farm in Elizabeth to Oglebay in West Virginia. And she got us connected to Resurrection church right up the street and their annual Fun Flair carnival. For one of those carnivals, Faith couldn’t make it up because she had just had surgery on her leg, so my mum asked Joan, John, Conner and I to go up in her stead and win all of Faith’s favorite stuffies for her, which we called the “Freakish things.”

Besides her family, her faith was what sustained her and gave her suffering both meaning and purpose. There are many Catholics, but I’d argue that most didn’t almost become a nun; had an altar in their home; had an image of the virgin Mary or Jesus on every single wall of their home (including the statue out front of the house Conner always called “body bag Mary” because my mum wrapped it in plastic every winter to keep the paint from chipping); prayed the chaplet of mercy every single day at 3pm for 40 plus years with my dad; said the rosery for years over the phone with one of her best friends (without ever missing a single day); and would bribe her kids with McDonald’s happy meals so that they’d sit in back of the church at Ressi here in Brookline and St Basil’s and the Passionate Convent in Carrick for hours long adoration during holy days of obligation and going to mass on Sundays, Mondays for the Novena and Fridays just for the hell of it. My mum was as Catholic as they come, and she saw her suffering as something she could offer up to both save souls and help those in need.

If a friend or family member needed a place to stay or food to eat, my mum would house and feed them, sometimes for significant lengths of time. When family members were separated from each other because of hardship and poverty, she’d write them letters to make sure they knew they were still loved. If a stranger needed money, she’d give it to them. If someone needed prayer, she’d pray for them. When she was in immense pain, she’d offer it up to save souls stuck in purgatory; I’m sure there’s a hell of a lot of souls she had to have saved over the years. Her desire to use her own suffering as the thing that could give her purpose is part of what drove, in part, all of my siblings and me towards helping professions, from providing therapy to doing investigative journalism and from teaching English to refugees to combatting poverty, community gun violence and racial and economic segregation.

My mum’s legacy is one of resilience, her own brand of love and using her own suffering to relate to, give purpose to and ultimately help others in need. That legacy is embodied in us and has also saved us time and time again, from helping me and my brother survive our own struggles with health issues, and aiding me in my prior battle with prescription-induced dependency, to my dad, my siblings, and me learning to never, ever give up in the face of all odds, despite how hard life has been and can be.   

On August 23^rd of this year, my mum would have celebrated her 70^th birthday. That same day, my dad and mum would also have celebrated their 40^th wedding anniversary. The fusion of her birthday with her wedding reflects something deeply profound about my mum: the purpose of marriage was family, which was the hallmark of her life. While the last few months were extremely hard for my mum, I will always thank God that they brought our family together in more ways than I can say.

Because of significant loss, poverty and trauma, and the consequences that that sort of cyclical violence can bring, much of both my immediate and extended family were estranged from each other for almost all my young adult and adult life, which was very different from our connection during my childhood and all the times we spent together in Knoxville. But it was my mom actively dying these past few months that ultimately brought our family back together. All in our own way, many of us found some level of reconciliation, reconnection, memory, love and closure these last few months, both with my mum and with each other. Something I will forever be thankful for.

On her very last day on earth, July 15^th, 2026, unlike so many other days of her life, it was peaceful and she seemed at peace. My dad, my siblings and I sat with her all day, and my sister Faith called in virtually, multiple times, from Washington D.C. In the final hours before her death, having been completely sedated since the night prior, I sat alone with her in inpatient hospice at Mercy Hospital, her room overlooking the South Pittsburgh neighborhoods that she had called home her entire life.

I went through every memory that came to mind from my birth until that moment; while playing a playlist I put together of all her favorite 80s synth pop, 70s rock and Bobby Sherman songs. The songs she used to play on blast as she danced my siblings, my dad, and I around the living room when we were kids. She’d listen to her favorite song “Bridge Over Troubled Water” on repeat when she was going through hard times. Her love of music, along with my dad’s love of hardcore punk, is what made me become a musician and is what made my siblings and I deep lovers of music ourselves. Listening to music is much of what we did in the final months before she died, listening to both her favorites and all the music that my other best-friend Dillon and I made over the years, with our bands Awkward Friend Dave and Today is the Best Day Ever.

At the very end of my going over all the memories that stood out the most, I told her it was okay to go to heaven. For the first time in hours, at the same exact time I said it, she raised her eyebrows twice, making me think that she heard me. When my sister Joan got back to the hospital, I sat next to my mum, playing the song “Tonight” by Social Distortion on repeat and wrote this eulogy for her. I then read it aloud to both my mum and my sister. After I finished, my mum’s breathing started to slow down considerably. Getting a feeling that we should say the Rosary for her, Joan started to pray and then mum gave her last breath as we said the very last Glory Be. Mum, I’m glad your suffering has finally come to an end. Know that you did so much good with it, as have your husband and children. You are so deeply loved. Rest in peace with everyone you’ve lost. We’ll see you later, alligator (after a while, crocodile).