Tribute to slain grandmother
The life of Regina Brunner Holmes was celebrated yesterday by her family and friends during a memorial service held in Bucks County.
AN INDEPENDENT-MINDED but detail-oriented woman who was an advocate for the less fortunate, devoted matriarch - that's how Regina Brunner Holmes was celebrated yesterday by her family and friends at a moving memorial service.
Holmes, 85, was killed on June 29, allegedly by a neighborhood handyman, and found by police three days later in her East Mount Airy home.
Her sons, Adam Brunner and Eric Brunner, said in separate interviews that the memorial service was meant not just for family and friends in mourning, but also for others in the Philadelphia-area community traumatized by reports of the shocking murder.
About 200 to 300 people filled the Joseph Levine & Sons funeral home in Trevose, Bucks County.
"Our job today was to create a space to honor my mom and help the community process and heal as well," said Adam Brunner, Holmes' youngest son.
Their mother lived a full life and wasn't a victim, the brothers said.
She helped establish a nonprofit to assist seniors. She reported for the Chestnut Hill Local. She wrote poems and plays. She loved her sons and her grandchildren.
"She was a very caring woman and very protective of us," Adam Brunner said. He called Holmes "a very competent person. Very organized. Very clean and super detail-oriented.
"She had a list and she plowed right through her list and nobody could believe how fast she did it," he added.
Rennie Cohen knew Holmes' methods too well, she told the group. Cohen, the former executive director of Center in the Park, and Holmes joined forces in the mid-1970s to establish the Germantown senior center.
Cohen read from an open letter she had written to her slain colleague, recalling that Brunner arrived to work at 8:30 a.m. and left "exactly" at 4:30 p.m.
"Sitting at your typewriter totally focused and methodically tending to what you had mapped out for the day . . . You did everything fast, seemed really sure of yourself and clearly intimidated me," Cohen said.
Cohen was the visionary, she said, "hellbent on making new projects happen" and Holmes was the "critical thinker."
"Your life, Regina, was always busy with creating things that gave you purpose and meaning," Cohen said. "All those who were in your family, friendship and work circles were grateful that you touched their lives."
The Brunner brothers said they were angry - yet wanted to forgive the man who ended their mother's life.
Adam Brunner told those who gathered at the funeral home that he had learned a lesson the day in 1968 that the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated and he saw tears roll down his mother's face.
He asked his mother what happened and "she said, 'A very good man and leader was killed today,' " Adam Brunner said. "I never forgot that moment. My mother always cared about injustice, inequality and the suffering of others.
"In keeping with this lesson, my brother and I . . . yes we are extremely angry that our mother was terribly beaten and then killed," Adam Brunner said. "But we both feel so sad that we live in a world where so many people's lives are filled with trauma, pain, poverty and sadness.
"Any man who was capable of our mother's murder and the way it was done, must have suffered so much for his heart to turn so cold," he added.
Regina Kohn was born in 1930, in Wynnefield, to Martin Kohn, a life-insurance salesman, and Fanny Kohn (nee Somerson), a stay-at-home mom, her family said.
Regina attended the former Mann School, Dimner Beeber School and Overbrook High School, Eric Brunner said. She probably didn't graduate from Overbrook, which she left at age 16, her son said.
Robert Hutchins, an educational philosopher and president of the University of Chicago, had run a gifted-student program at Overbrook that allowed students to enter the University of Chicago without a high-school degree, Eric Brunner said.
His mother graduated from the University of Chicago and later received her master's degree from Goddard College in Vermont.
Besides her sons, Holmes' survivors include their wives, Leah Weisman Brunner and Juliana Clawson; her brother, Louis Kohn; and her grandchildren Madeleine, David and Anna.
The family will receive visitors at Adam Brunner's home today from 1 to 4 p.m. In lieu of flowers, contributions may be made in Holmes' memory to Center In The Park or The Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at Temple University.
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