It's hard to summarize someone's life in a few minutes. Maria Pepita Caldeo Grossman, Tita to all family members and close friends. I welcome all family, friends, and neighbors that are here today to honor her. She was a wife, sister, aunt, and a surrogate mother to her niece, Tracey. She was a Filipino Catholic married to a New York Jew, but she didn't hold it against me! Actually, we respected, honored, and celebrated both our religious spiritualism. This funeral service is my way of respecting and honoring her religious heritage.

We were teammates and soulmates for 38 amazing years, through ups and downs, and even when she got upset with me and told me to "shut-up." Life is not a matter of counting the years. It's a matter of making the years count. We took care of each other's bodies and souls up to the day, the second, she passed away.

She could be generous, loving and tender, full of laughter and joy, tears, and sorrow; as "Leo the Lion," she could be fiercely loyal and a staunch defender of people she deeply cared for. She was a devoted Catholic Parishioner of deeply religious faith, who kept her crucifix and rosary in her purse or underneath her bedroom pillow, read gospels, hymns and psalms, prayed for and had mass intentions for her devoted deceased parents and three brothers.

She suffered and was a survivor during her life: two breast mastectomies, open heart surgery, hit by a DUI driver, and tumors covering 30% of her bladder.

And yet, we celebrate her life here today, our family, friends, and neighbors, as a survivor, as a unique life force, that had immense value and significant impact on mine and others lives, and we will greatly miss her. She has flown to heaven with a flock of angels alongside her and touched the face of God.

At the end, she said, "Don't be sad, pray for me," and that is what we are doing here today. She said, "I don't want to leave you," and I said, "I loved you yesterday, I love you today, I will always love you. You will always be a part of me, I will always be a part of you. When you get to heaven, one day I'll join you there and we will be back together again, forever; May God honor and protect you.