From Linda: EULOGY
I look out at everyone here – family and friends – and I think about the memories we all hold of Mike – and it fills me with joy. It seems as if he is here with us.
I’m Linda, Michael’s sister – the oldest child in our family of five kids – in order of birth it is me, Mike, then Paul, and Colleen and Laura.
We are here to celebrate Mike’s earthly life and death – his courage and his faith – and the power that it brings to heal our sadness.
Let me share some of my favorite memories of Mike’s early life.
Michael was born on October 20, 1950 at the Naval Hospital in San Diego- on my second birthday. My mother presented him to me as a special birthday gift. I considered him mine and vowed to protect him. He was born a month after his due date – hard to believe – but it would be like him to wait so he could come into the world on my birthday.
Michael was like that. He lived his whole life with his own sense of time – and in his own way – gracious, thoughtful, determined, and unflappable. That was his super power. That’s how he came into the world – and that’s how he left. In his own way and in his own time.
Mom described him as a “perfect” baby. One of those babies who sleeps well and hardly ever cries. He had a sweet disposition and a big smile. He was easy on people. Mom and her friends talked about his big brown eyes and how beautiful he was.
Our first few years together, we lived in Ocean Beach, CA, in a 2nd floor apartment in a building that sat on the sand and had salt-air breezes flowing through it. We spent our days playing at the edge of the ocean in the realm of sunshine, mermaids and fisherman, sand castles and sea shells, seagulls and crabs and warm waves lapping at our feet.
When I was four and Mike was two, we moved with mom to her hometown of Portsmouth, New Hampshire – the polar opposite of San Diego – in temperament and climate- to live with our grandparents. It was a place of belonging where we would come to know Mom’s extended family and their strong ties to the Catholic Church. There was a sweet balance between the serious and the playful in our lives here. – Before getting up and going to mass every morning, Grandpa would rough-house with us in his bed, giving us horsey rides and rides to the moon until we all fell out laughing. – Grandma taught us about her love of playing cards – and winning and how to say our prayers on our knees before bed each night. Grandpa took us to the “cookie store” and uptown – where as a well-liked local politician he knew everyone. Grandpa had Mike help him fix things around the house. That’s where he learned to be so handy. Mike and I spend our days running freely through the neighborhood inviting everyone we met to our imaginary puppet shows and we ended each day, snuggling in our big bed laughing and sharing secrets. “Did you see the jars by the bedside where Grandma and Grandpa keep their teeth?”
Mom married Speed when Mike was 5, and I was 7. We moved to Hawthorne, Nevada, a speck of a town in the middle of nowhere and surrounded by an Ammunitions Depot. Here our family grew. We had a new brother, Paul who was 3 – Colleen came nine months later – and Tarface, a loveable black Labrador retriever, who was large enough for us to ride. Mike, Paul, and I quickly bonded. When there was a kid violation, Mom would stand us all up in front of her and ask in a serious tone, “Who ate all those cookies?” Or, “Who tracked in all that mud?” After some silence, I would reply, “I don’t know, maybe it was Tarface.” Mike and Paul would nod their heads in agreement with a hidden smile. We would ride our bikes all day in endless circles, or run up the street to play marbles. Mike and I were pros – and with Paul as our backup – we always came home with a new set of treasured wins. Aggies! Cat Eyes! Boulders! And Steelies! Treasures.
A year later, in 1957 we moved again, to Honolulu. The warm tropical weather agreed with us. It wasn’t a state yet and only a couple of hotels were on Waikiki Beach. I hoped we would live in a grass hut but we moved into a duplex next to a tall hill of coastal scrub. Mike, Paul and I rushed up and down that daunting hill most days, halted only by banana spiders the size of silver dollars with their webs spanning from one side of the path to the other and scorpions, centipedes and lizards crossing the trail. Our favorite adventure was camping in beach cottages on the North Shore and body surfing all day. We loved the existential challenge. With each wave, we inevitably got caught tumbling and twisting in the force of the undertow. We would pop up gasping for breath and laugh, then waited anxiously till everyone burst free and called, “I’m here.” All accounted for, we headed back for more. After three years in Hawaii, our bodies browned, our feet callused, and with Pigeon English creeping into our language, Mom was anxious to get us back to the States and into shoes -before it was too late.
In 1960 we moved back to San Diego. Mike, Paul, and I were in our pre-teen years 12, 10, and 8. Colleen was 4. My parents bought their first home northeast of San Diego. We lived there for a long six years. During that time Laura was born to the delight of all of us. Now Colleen had a playmate. We had a Catholic Church just up the street. Mom sent us to confession on Saturdays, and all the kids to mass on Sunday. All my siblings slept during mass, except Laura would who would mimic the priests and sing back to them during High Mass, causing us all to giggle. Mike tells a story about how he confessed to the priest in the confessional booth that he had committed “adultery” because he kissed a girl in his class! He was given the normal penance of 3 Hail Mary’s and 2 Our Fathers. We grew into teen agers. We still loved to play cards and board games. We still backed each other up when we ran afoul of our parents’ rules. Michael’s super powers continued to pay off for him. No one could beat him in checkers or canasta and even more impressive, no one else could find Mom’s hidden stash of cookies. Mike could fix anything. I watched him quietly fix our broken washing machine after Speed had cursed it and left it all apart in frustration. Mike quietly walked over to it when no one was looking and just fixed it and just as quietly walked away.
At the end of the 60’s, Speed retired from the Navy and moved the family to Virginia. I moved to Long Beach, got married and started my own family. Mike joined the Marine Corp right out of High School. I couldn’t imagine it – with his easy going nature, his calm determined approach to things, his unflappable personality, his offer of a warm smile and an easy laugh in the face of conflict. How would this work? I was very concerned. He later said he joined to prove to Speed that he was as tough as he was, maybe tougher. When Mike completed his tour of duty and returned to San Diego, he was lost, looking for some direction and something to commit his life to. And then along came Sarah! —– And we will be forever grateful for her. She picked up the mantle from me and promised to love and protect him. And she did. Their love and life together was a shining example and blessing for all of us.
We love you Mike – stay close in our hearts.
From Sarah: EULOGY
I met Michael in 1972 in San Diego California, and there was that sense of “love at first site”. After a couple of weeks of hanging out, (for us that meant going to church and prayer meetings together) I clearly had a sense that I had been with this eternal soul before and we had lived out life into old age together.
Michael and I couldn’t have come from more diverse backgrounds. Him, a military
family, me a Quaker family. Me marching in protest of the Vietnam war. Him
signing up as a Marine to go fight in it. My father, a highly degreed Harvard professor, and his father completed High School after returning from WWII. Our vocabulary’s differed so considerably, so how to communicate.
What we had in common, what we agreed on together was a true zeal for a walk with God. We had both had life changing experiences through a connection with Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit. By the time we had been married only a year we were sent out to help establish a church in Yakima, Washington. Before too long, he was asked to pastor the church there.
Michael loved studying the Bible and became adept at delivering a message that would somehow seep into the locked-up places in people’s hearts. His way was not confronting, not battering down or exhorting people, but often by exposing his own vulnerable areas by telling a story. And of course, there was always scriptures to back things up.
Michael changed jobs a lot. He would quit a job easily if there was a church event he wanted to attend, or if we were moved to a different location to pastor another church. Therefore, he was capable of a myriad tasks. House painting, car mechanic, electrician’s helper for starters. He was also an early adopter with computers and learned how to program before it was well known purchasing his own personal computer in the mid-1980s. He used his skills to write job costing programs for the company I worked for helping the owner to turn a profit. Eventually, with his agile mind, he learned the ropes and took over the bookkeeping and office management of the same company.
Later, because the church was adopting a computer network for communications, he learned to document and became a technical writer. He also worked in the church’s legal office creating corporate meeting minutes and helping set up the legal foundations of many of the related churches.
That eventually led to becoming the webmaster for the same group of churches.
In 2018, after over 40 years of attending and serving the church, it became apparent that there was corruption in the leadership. This was devastating for both of us and we ending up leaving the church.
Michael, being the careful studious person he was, took all the doctrines and belief systems apart in his mind, on paper and in our discussions together. Why and how had we missed the great responsibility and opportunity of seeking God ourselves rather than relying on our church leaders for true direction? How had we so easily fallen into that trap and directed those under us to do the same? We also met with other members of the church to work through this event.
Our search went beyond our experience with our particular church to Christianity in general. What was our true Christian experience and how much did we believe because we were simply told to believe it. How much of culture and society is based on what people are simply told? This took inner work, reading helpful books and much time in meditation. You will notice some of the helpful books Michael found on display on the table in the foyer. We worked together to free ourselves from paradigms that were simply human, mind of man, structures.
Michael and I moved to the PNW in 2022, in an effort to reset our lives and start over. We were not willing to let go of the drive towards finding divinity and expressing it in our lives. It wasn’t long before we found other like-minded individuals in Eugene. We searched deeply until we saw that what was left was the all-encompassing, all-inclusive love of God, to be found in all of his/ her/ or their creation. Love is at the core of so many religious traditions but often must be found by searching deeply within.
Michael became very ill in March of 2023. The hospitals and their procedures couldn’t save him and after 17 days in the hospital he was put in hospice to die. There is nothing like being very ill to bring up mental an emotional scarring. He was good with the idea of dying and ready to leave this world of apparent lies. Maybe, he thought, he would find more reality upon passing over the veil. In fact, when I had asked people to pray for him, he reacted with anger. He had not wanted to be prayed for! He thought prayer hadn’t worked for us in the church. He felt this was a reflection on his lack of faith. He wondered, are Christians delusional?
Then something happened. He had lost a lot of weight; he was on all kinds of pain killing opiates and was catheterized so that he was bed-bound for around 6 weeks. An episode occurred where he went into convulsions and tremors and vomited and went unconscious. The doctor had been with him the day before saying he had days maybe a couple weeks to live. There he was, eyes rolled back in his head and unresponsive. Meanwhile I had notified some friends of his condition and asked for prayer anyway. John and Mandy, our eldest son and wife, had come up from Texas with their children, and they prayed for him. And strangely (or not) he came to and announced that he wanted to live. I sighed and said, “I’ll believe it when I see it!”
Something happened during that blackout that changed his mind. He has no memory of changing his mind, but he woke up saying, “I want to live large.” Then later he said, “That is done by not being afraid to love!”
Then he was fine with people praying for him, and he knew it was the love, an actual substance that made all the difference. Being open to receive love allows a person to open up and give that love out. Here is exemplified the type found in Jesus Christ. A constant force of love in the form of total and complete forgiveness going out to the world and to each individual. It is a most wonderful force to open up to.
Sure enough, over the next days and weeks he radically improved. It took work and persistence which he applied daily by getting out of bed and sitting on the back patio to soak up sunshine. Training himself to pee again without a catheter. And weaning himself off the pain pills. Although he had stopped having much pain.
The next year and a half were difficult physically for Michael, as the cancer had apparently gone into remission but due to external drains for his biliary tract he was subject to a lot of infections. He endured sepsis 4 times and many trips to the ER. His oncologist said he wasn’t treatable due to the infections and the surgeons agreed there was nothing they could do to improve his condition. But in that time, we made so many connections with our loved ones from the church we had left, giving no regard as to what “side” of a church split they may be on. Knowing in the deepest of our hearts that we are all broken, not perfect and that God’s grace and love is greater than our short comings. All we knew is that we loved everyone. Deeply.
Also, during that time, we had our special times together he and I, and times with our spiritually like-minded friends here in Eugene.
Michael started a website (www.mcmullenfam.com) open for anyone who wanted to view it. There he wrote spiritual stories of import from his life. I wrote health updates to keep people in the know of what we were going through. I always asked for prayer, and without fail, conditions improved when I would post my requests. Prayer works. Period.
In September of 2024 his liver failure started the march towards his death and on 12/30/24, one day after our 51st anniversary, he left his body with family by his side.
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