Goodbye, Devoted Friend

We love her still. Satie, 1997-2007.

Lorraine Cosgrove Ware

The following are comments I was honored to have the opportunity to share on the very sad occasion of the memorial service for my friend Lorraine. (Photo here by her friend Ronnie.)

Just a brief disclaimer, in words from the poet John Donne:
Language thou art too narrow, and too weak
To ease us now; great sorrow cannot speak.

So we may not speak of our sorrow today, though we feel it. We’ll speak instead of our gratitude for having known Lorraine.

Lorraine was impeccable.

In her dress, her manners, her taste and how she kept her home (and her boat), in the work she produced and her professionalism… also in her treatment of friends and loved ones. Everything about her was polished and crisp and sharp.

If you didn’t know Lorraine and heard that description, you might picture someone prim or fussy or stuck-in-the-muddish.

I had the really good fortune to share an office with Lorraine for six years at her most recent workplace. I have to admit: That first day when she came in with her impeccable self to the office, I was intimidated. And when, day after day, she was so perfectly put together and coiffed, so professional, so clearly accomplished and ambitious…I, feeling like a lumbering ragamuffin by contrast, wondered, gee, will we have anything in common? Will we even get along?

As you can imagine, it didn’t take long for me to be delighted by her friendliness and surprised by her sort-of sly and very sharp and even subversive wit. That’s not what appearances had led me to expect. She was definitely not prim or fussy or stuck-in-the-muddish. She was a total blessing to my work life, and we became real friends in and beyond the office.

We solved many of the world’s problems, we liked to say, up there in the pod on the third floor on Old Connecticut Path. And we wondered indignantly why the Nobel Committee was not calling. Lorraine had mock outrage down to an ironic science. And she could portray a satiric buying-in to the absurdities in life, with a subtlety and pointedness that would put Stephen Colbert to shame. Her sense of humor was, indeed, impeccable. Perhaps most uniquely, she told incredibly comic stories without malice.

Lorraine was smart. She made good decisions. She made an especially good one, downright impeccable, in choosing her spouse. Andy was a great match for many reasons—besides just being a good guy. She loved him like crazy. They shared a lot of adventures, had common interests, and were both keenly funny. Most memorable just now, though, is how Andy accompanied Lorraine through the experience of cancer with sensitivity and strength and humor. And those of us who love Lorraine are so grateful to you Andy for being there every day and taking such good care of her.

So, Lorraine had cancer. But she did not become a cancer victim. She was an impeccable model of how to handle, even fight an illness and yet remain fully engaged in the rest of life. And doing that, she paved a way down a difficult road that we will all inevitably travel.

There are some lessons I aim to remember from how she lived. (I’ve distilled them to bullet points with examples in the spirit of research, her professional specialty…)

Go broad.
Make all you’ve done a part of you.
Live in the South Pacific. Sell cosmetics. Meditate. Learn the songs of cowboys, hired hands, and other wanderers. Get an MBA and Big Papi’s autograph.

Go deep.
Do things thoroughly.
Don’t just get a boat, take electronic instrumentation classes with the Power Squadron. Don’t just go to the doctor, explore every modality in pursuit of your health.

Be daring.
You’re tougher than you look.
Sail in the dark. Eat haggis. Ski black diamonds first thing in the morning.
Be caring.
Share your strength.
Mentor colleagues. Send gifts to nieces and nephews. Keep things beautiful.

Laugh often.
And help others laugh.
Stop the battle of Gettysburg. Collide with Jimmy Connors in a doorway. Be one of the “chicks” in the house. [You may have to ask some of her friends for explanations here.]

Stay open.
Embrace what the world offers.
Read The House of Seven Gables. Be an exceptional hostess. Go to a fife & drum muster.

Go broad. Go deep. Be daring. Be caring. Laugh often. Stay open.

And, mostly, let’s remember—and thank—Lorraine, for being an impeccable teacher.

Hey, What Happened to All Those Posts? (Plus Invective)

What happened to all my posts?

Since May? Huh? Oh, right, now I remember; they never did make it out of my head. But they were boiling away in there and I e-mailed myself many reminders and enticing ideas. I’ll try to revisit them and see if any had value that survived the moment.

(New job recently and other schedule-altering things. Transitions eat up time. (What’ll be my excuse in another five months?))

But one thing continually plaguing my mind and bringing on fits of sputtering invective these days is how we are poisoning our world. Not in a dramatic Exxon Valdez kind of way; in an incremental, dull, nonphotogenic kind of way.

Dry cleaning. Paint for toys. Plastic water bottles. Antibiotics (and antibacterials, don’t get me started) and hormones in strange places. Cellular phones and towers. Agriculture. New and improved products of every stripe.

It’s not stuff you can get high-minded about avoiding. Everybody should now know that smoking is very bad for your health. If you persist in doing it, you’re a dum-dum. Likewise, eating a Supersize Me diet or working in asbestos remediation without a respirator are bad ideas. Most people have a choice in these things.

And, sure, they have a choice about dry cleaning, buying toys, walking down the street, or drinking water. But it’s an uninformed choice since they don’t know these things are potentially hazardous in the long term. And have no logical reason to suspect them. Products and services are offered up without concern and consumed without question. Despite complaints to the contrary from free market champions, there’s too little regulation about what we put on or in our bodies, let alone in the water or earth or air. How can we be so stupid?

More to the point, why does the government, which historically loves to invoke the defense of the citizenry to back up all kinds of bold and improbable acts (overseas particularly), not step up defend us once shadowy killers have been identified near at hand? (This is an analogy that bears exploring and would bring a new twist to a war on “terror.”) How do we ourselves contribute to the flood of poison? When will the connection be obvious enough to force action?

Maybe it’s not fair to ask how we can be so stupid. Maybe we are intrinsically hopeful and optimistic and trusting people and until presented with irrefutable evidence to the contrary, we prefer to go blithely about like Candide, all’s for the best in the best of all possible worlds (wasn’t that it?). But whether we (and I’m applying that collective pronoun back a generation or so) were trusting or wilfully ignorant, I think better living through chemistry has come around to bite us in the butt.

The reason I’m particularly pissed off about all this is that my close circle of friends (to say nothing of acquaintances or people at one degree of separation) now includes too many widow[er]s who are not yet at or past middle age. Bone, ovarian, pancreatic, and breast cancer killed their spouses. We do not live in Love Canal. We do not live in Hannaford, Washington, or Chernobyl, Ukraine. These friends who died took care of themselves, lived healthy, active, and athletic lives. Did not work in factories, mines, or incinerators. Did all they could to fight the disease. But where did it come from?

I know, thankfully, just as many survivors of cancer as people who have died from it. They too are young: in their 20s, 30s, 40s. Breast, brain, testicular, uterine…. And their survival would lead a lot of people to cheer: Hooray for treatment and advances in medicine. Send more money for cancer research! I’m glad they are still alive and grateful for what made that happen. So yes, keep the treatments coming. But what I still want to know is, where did the cancer come from?

Pharmaceutical companies enthusiastically pursue research into treatments, because they can sell these expensive life-saving tortures to people and doctors desperate to save lives. Where’s the profit in finding out the cause of these illnesses? Especially if the cause turns out to be within some other arm of your diversified business. (Check out The New Cigarette, reviewed in Slate.com.) Where’s the money to find and fight the genesis of this scourge instead of just swatting it back? (Yes, I know, in the same place as the money for finding and fighting the genesis for terrorism, but I digress.) Cynically, the return on the investment just isn’t as good.

I have a friend who takes this thinking a step further, with a so-far only privately expressed, completely heretical notion: Down with the Jimmy Fund!

That campaign platform would be a hard sell, even for me in my riled-up snit. But behind the memorably shocking slogan, his idea is serious. Spend at least as much on stopping the disease from occurring in the first place as on developing new ways to fight it once it strikes.

Somewhere there must be organizations or people researching exactly what we are putting in our environment that is killing us. (Let alone the fishes and frogs.) Anyone out there know? That way when next I’m asked to sponsor riders in the Pan Mass Challenge, a very fine event (money goes to the Dana Farber Cancer Institute), I can split my contribution between those riders and someone investigating further upstream.

Where does it come from? What unknown dangers wait in my cupboards? Where is the Upton Sinclair of our times?

Another Great Voice Quiet

This was a voice not so much to listen to for its beauty, but to read or hear for its mordant wit and exposure of hypocrisy and idiocy. Molly Ivins died yesterday, and I’m sad.

She was 62. It was breast cancer, like Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, that other great voice recently quieted. I don’t personally know too many people who’ve died of breast cancer but I do personally know way too many who have had it. I have no idea if these kinds of things actually do anything, but there is a site that claims to support free mammograms if you just click…

Of course that, or even searching for the cure, doesn’t address the real issue of why there is so much of this kind of disease among otherwise healthy people….the poisoning of our world, basically. But I digress. More on this in another post, if I remember.

I have had many an excellent laugh from Molly Ivins, though quite a lot of that laughter rueful. Her invective was not toothless. In fact, with that Texas accent even coming through in her writing, one might not even recognize it as invective. There was a certain generosity in her bitingly funny critique. A generosity that might leave wiggle room for some toadying, power-hungry, narrow-minded greedyguts to excuse their behavior on the grounds of being a complete moron.

Here’s a great paragraph from The Nation’s article about her:

It mattered, a lot, that Molly was writing for papers around the country during the Bush interregnum. She explained to disbelieving Minnesotans and Mainers that, yes, these men really were as mean, as self-serving and as delusional as they seemed. The book that Molly and her pal Lou Dubose wrote about their homeboy-in-chief, Shrub: The Short But Happy Political Life of George W. Bush (Random House, 2000), was the essential exposé of the man the Supreme Court elected President. And Ivins’s columns tore away any pretense of civility or citizenship erected by the likes of Karl Rove.

The New York Times remembrance ends with these paragraphs:

Ms. Ivins learned she had breast cancer in 1999 and was typically unvarnished in describing her treatments. “First they mutilate you; then they poison you; then they burn you,” she wrote. “I have been on blind dates better than that.”

But she kept writing her columns and kept writing and raising money for The Texas Observer.

Indeed, rarely has a reporter so embodied the ethos of her publication. On the paper’s 50th anniversary in 2004, she wrote: “This is where you can tell the truth without the bark on it, laugh at anyone who is ridiculous, and go after the bad guys with all the energy you have.”

Va col canto… Thank You, Lorraine

The world is a poorer place this week than last, with the untimely death of Lorraine Hunt Lieberson.

There are some fine obituaries of the 52-year-old mezzo-soprano in The New York Times (registration required), Playbill, and The San Francisco Chronicle, whose music critic Joshua Kosman puts it so well:

“I always loved hearing Hunt Lieberson sing, but I hated writing about her performances. More than with any other artist, her splendor seemed to defy description or accurate measure.

Words failed; superlatives bounced off her performances with an empty clang. You’d have to have been John Keats to convey any sense of the beauty she brought into the world.”

I saw her numerous times in Boston and always her first note would stun you, take your breath away, leave you all goose-bumpy. A friend who had excellent seats (center, row 4 or something) at a recital in 1998 or 99 said that sitting directly in front of her, he could feel the air vibrating before his face.

Whenever mailings came from the BSO or the Bank of America Celebrity Series, I always looked eagerly to see when she was coming to town and arrange my budgeted music consumption around that. I suspect those mailings will now pile up unread for awhile.

The New Yorker of Jan. 5, 2004, ran a profile of Lorraine Hunt Lieberson. Through that, and the facts of her career, she has been called the anti-diva, an arch maverick and other appealing epithets. Maybe because of going about it differently or in spite of that, she gave the world something amazing and lasting in her too short life. I am forever grateful.

If you have not heard her, try her recording of Handel Arias for a general sampling of gorgeous stuff. I am particularly partial to an early recording (she was still plain Hunt and billed as a soprano) of Handel’s cantata Clori, Tirsi e Fileno with Jill Feldman and Drew Minter. Both recordings include the aria Va col canto. (Va col canto lusingando/ la sua bella il rusignuolo…. With his singing the nightingale/ charms his beloved.) It will make you remember being in love on a crystal September day with wind in your hair. Something soaring like that.

NPR offers a free listen to a tune it called the best classical song of 2004, Handel’s Ombra mai fu. Also the aria from J.S. Bach’s cantata Ich habe genug, along with an interview with the singer.