In Memoriam

February 12, 2026

In Memoriam – Michele Maria Cogley (April 22, 1947 - November 30, 2025)

Way back in the early nineties, I invited my mother to watch a movie that had received excellent reviews, which, in all fairness, was all I knew about it. My mother, always one to be drawn to creative works that excited others, readily accepted. For about two hours, there was complete silence, broken only by the occasional awkward sound of someone shuffling uncomnfortably in their seat. As the end credits rolled, I glanced over to her and asked her opinion. “Well, it was good,” she said, “but probably not the best thing to watch with your mother.” The film: Abel Ferrara’s Bad Lieutenant.
 
My mother passed away on November 30, 2025. She was 78. She experienced a world of constant change and chaos, and she adapted to it as best she could. By the time she was 25, she had seen the assassinations of both presidents and civil rights leaders, seen humans walk on the moon for the first time, and watched the horrors of war on live television in a way previous generations had not. She became a hippy, got married, had children, got divorced, and lived through years of financial and personal hardship. Throughout it all, she never lost hope that there was a brighter future ahead, and she worked hard to make that a reality.
 
In life, she remained her children’s biggest fan. Whenever one of us had a performance or competition, we could count on her being in the audience, whether that was an afterschool baseball game or an evening theatrical performance. In one of my earlier memories, I’m standing onstage holding up a cardboard cutout of a flower, and out of the corner of my eye, I catch a glimpse of her standing attentively in the right aisle. Over the years, she would collect numerous mementos of her children’s performances, from pictures to programs with our names in it. Some of these were from local productions that she also took part in.
 
And if you were her children’s or grandchildren’s friends, you were also hers. She took an interest in their lives and formed bonds with them. There are numerous pictures of her at parties thrown by friends of her children, and it was always at the invitation of the friend. If one of her children was in a relationship, she went out of her way to make that person feel welcomed and safe. That so many people from her children’s childhoods showed up at her memorial is a testament to those connections that she forged.
 
My mother loved movies. She and my stepfather saw every Woody Allen movie on the day of its release, and when VHS came out, she made sure we had a VCR and membership to local video stores. We were fortunate to have two local specialty movie theaters that showed films that the main movie theaters did not, and together we saw films like Hoosiers and Ran there, the latter of which inspired an interest in foreign films that remains with me today. She found joy in silly comedies like Troop Beverly Hills and was enthralled in the new worlds offered by Blade Runner and the Star Wars films. When Return of the Jedi came out in 1983, she went into the theater in between screenings and used paper plates to reserve the best seats in the house.
 
In her last few years, television was easier for her to engage in. She found intrigue in adaptations of novels she’d read in her youth, such as The Handmaid’s Tale, and she was drawn into fantasy worlds involving dragons, chivalrous heroes, and ancient gods, which naturally made Game of Thrones and American Gods weekly musts.
 
My mother eventually began teaching elementary school in San Francisco, and she applied the same devotion and dedication to her students that she had to her children. What the school district didn’t provide, she did, whether it was notebooks, pencils, short readers, or art supplies, and over the years, she collected boxes and boxes of teaching material the she created herself. She even co-wrote a book on activities for afterschool programs. She also made an effort to keep up-to-date with what her students were interested in. This meant knowing who the current WWF champion was, what Brandon, Dylan, and the rest of the 90210 gang were up to, and who had won the previous night’s local sporting events.
 
The years brought further change. Some – grandchildren, vacations, retirement – were positive. Others – children moving away, health problems – not so much. She visited Taiwan once after the birth of my daughter, and I’ll always remember the smile on her face as she held her for the first time. Over the years, she made an effort to forge a relationship with her, but it was difficult and ultimately only partially successful.
 
In a movie, this would have been different. There would have been a last-minute phone call or text that conveyed a healing or forgiving message. One of her children would find in her final diary entry an expression of pride in who that child had become or what they had made of their lives. In other words, there would be closure. In reality, true closure is rare, yet death has a way of bringing back the good, not the bad. I remember our walks in Taipei, our early discussions about love when I was a confused teenager unsure if someone would like me, the happiness she showed at my graduations, the embraces she offered my wife’s family, the way her students looked at her when she taught, the quiet moments when she wrote in her diary, and the way she could enlighten you with her insights into time, books, and movies. In our last conversation, we talked about my daughter’s swimming skills, and she marveled at her performance in a school competition. She felt such pride in the accomplishments of others. I’m fortunate to have known her.