We were married for 46 years and 8 months. I had known for some time that we were unlikely to make it together to our golden anniversary. So on September 12 of this year we went to the Earle for dinner. At 7:15 PM I said “now… now is the moment 50 years ago that we met.” So we did get to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of something.
Ironically, Carol never remembered our meeting, I on the other hand did and do. It’s understandable. She was a sophomore member of the Student Government Council, I was a politically ambitious freshman in my first weeks at school. I went to an SGC meeting with a dorm-mate, who introduced us in the elevator of the Student Activities Building.
She was beautiful of course, but to me the more impressive thing was how engaged she was. During a break she sat cross-legged in a corner with a group who had approached SGC with some issue, trying to figure out how to advance their cause. More than the elevator, that is the image sticks with me. In many ways it is the quintessence of her life. She spent countless hours, with countless groups, sitting cross-legged in countless corners, working to advance their causes, large and small.
It was not love at first sight. Our story is not a romantic comedy. Sparks did not fly across the room. I did not go home and write “I just met the woman I’m going to marry.” Romance bloomed two years later while we were both working at the University Cellar. But when we started dating we fell in love quickly and we fell hard. Three months later we were living together. After a year and a half, we were married.
Carol was born a feminist. It had to be nature over nurture. For in the nurture category, her father believed it was important for her to take typing, so she would be able to get a job as a secretary. How did she do in that typing class? Are you kidding. She was not going to do anything in preparation for being a secretary. Now, someone took that typing class in high school. And that someone typed all her graduate school papers, before there was word processing. Not as magnanimous as it sounds. In exchange I was allowed in the indulgence of an IBM correcting selectric typewriter.
There’s another early feminist story that I love. As Neill told you, she was a strong swimmer. She got a job as a lifeguard at the YMCA. Then the Y had to cut back. So they fired all the girl life guards. Because, after all, high school boys needed the jobs more than high-school girls. We will never know the precise details of the conversation between Carol and the Y management, although we can guess. What we do know is that she and many of the other girls kept their jobs.
I have labeled her a righteous feminist. But she could be righteous in other ways. It was well known in our family that you did not want to be an intransient bureaucrat on the other side of a counter from Carol. When she felt she was being mistreated, her wrath was epic and almost always effective. Anthony, Evelyn and I have a vivid memory of a hotel lobby where we arrived early and found they did not have a room ready for us. She went to work on the clerk while the three of us slithered away and hid behind a pillar. We got a room of course. She said to us “you like the results don’t you”. We replied “yes, but we don’t want to watch it happen.”
So here is lesson number one from her life. To quote Mitch McConnell, “nevertheless, she persisted”. Carol showed us that now and again that everyone needs to be pushy, especially women. She stood up for herself, she stood up for her family, and she stood up for countless others.
Most of you know that we traveled extensively. In the lobby you can see a pin-map with the places we traveled to. As a traveler, she hungered for nature, scenery, art, culture, street life, and of course, food. She loved
the cactus and flowers in Tucson, the canyons in Utah, the mountains in Colorado,
the coral and fish in the Virgin Islands, the humpback whales in Hawaii, the sea otters in Alaska, the elephants and lions in Botswana,
the rigidly organized Adriatic beaches in Italy, the temples and people of Bhutan, the scarlet macaws in Costa Rica, the orangutans of Borneo,
the roman ruins all over Italy, the ruins and temples in Cambodia,
the penguins on the Falkland Islands, the pelicans on Captiva Island, the blue footed boobies and albatross on the Galapagos islands, the blue whales and dolphins in the Sea of Cortez, and street markets in every corner of the globe.
There are three animals that particularly touched her. First are the gray whales in San Ignacio Lagoon in the Baja Peninsula. These gray whales have decided to be friendly with people, and they were a major reason for our visit to Baja. We had a mother and baby come to the boat to be petted, if you can call touching a whale petting. As they left, the baby lifted its tail and sprayed us. Second are the wild dogs of Botswana. One of our camps had a pack of 19 dogs in residence. It was one of the highlights of that trip to see them in action. Third are the sandhill cranes by our dock at Park Lake. Every summer we had a family of three cranes. They would fly in during the evening with their characteristic trumpeting sound that never failed to fill her heart.
In the travel map in the lobby you may notice that there are no pins in Italy. That’s because Italy needs its own map, with its own pins. And you can see that map in the lobby
Carol seemed to always know that Italy was her place. It is the perfect confluence of so many things she loved. In 1991 she told me we had to go to Italy, so we did. I think it’s fair to say Italy for us was love at first sight. When we got home, she said “we have to go back.” I replied sure, in 3 or 4 years I think it would be fun to go again.” She said, “no, we have to go back next year.” So we did. We made 20 trips to Italy spending a total of more than 400 days in the country.
My explanation to the Italians was always “Condividiamo la fatica, io studio italiano, la Contessa invece studia italia.” For those of you who don’t speak italian - We share the effort. I study italian. The countess instead studies Italy. And study Italy she did. Her library of books on Italy numbers more than two dozen volumes. That’s not counting any of the travel guides. Lying on her desk as the time of her death was this volume: Prisoners of Hope, The Silver Age of the Italian Jews 1924—1974. How is that for arcane?
She was taken with the resorgimento, which is often portrayed as the unification of Italy, but which she saw as the north conquering, and then exploiting, the south. She was a major fan of the Etruscans who predated the roman empire. Two years ago she took me to an Etruscan necropolis north of Rome. She loved the little quirks of modern Italian life. She loved the pageantry and downright weirdness of Italian festivals. We watched teams race the statues of saints up the mountain, watched Italians race up hill on stilts, and watched the symbolic mating of male and female trees.
Everywhere we traveled she was always the student transformed into the teacher. Everyone in the family has memories of wandering through some famous place with Carol reading the explanation from her omni-present guide books. Our travels were enriched by her insatiable curiosity.
You might be surprised to learn that Carol could be a sports fan. Two sports stick out – women’s gymnastics and men’s basketball. For decades she was a serious fan of both teams. In 1989 she traveled to Lexington to see the basketball team win the regional tournament on its way to the national championship. In 1992 she took the train to Minneapolis to watch the fab-five come up one game short. She made a dozen trips to the NCAA women’s gymnastics championships all over the country.
She was quick to let you know that the basketball referees were highly unfair to Michigan and did not understand what a foul was. But her real scorn was saved for gymnastics judges who constantly scored Michigan too low, while scoring other schools, particularly Georgia, too high.
Carol had another strident opinion – every time a basketball player missed a free throw, she would insist that they should be forced to shoot underhand, the way the girls did in high school. Time after time, I patiently mansplained to her that you wanted a consistent jump shot, practiced over and over. And you want to use that jump shot for free throws as well as for regular shots.
Then came her moment of triumph. Malcolm Gladwell has a podcast called revisionist history. He did a show describing how Rick Barry, one of the best free throw shooters ever, shot free throws underhand. And Wilt Chamberlain, one of the worst ever, had his best free-throw percentage during the year that Barry convinced him to use the underhand technique. It turns out underhand is without question a better way to shoot free throws. She was right, I was wrong. She was delighted, and so was I.
Here is lesson number two from her life. Mario Cuomo said “In this life, you should read everything you can read. Taste everything you can taste. Meet everyone you can meet. Travel everywhere you can travel. Learn everything you can learn. Experience everything you can experience.” She did all of those and we can add one more that Cuomo was forced to leave out “Drink everything you can drink”. She became my bartender offering up a delicious craft cocktail every evening.
You’ve already heard plenty about what Carol’s life meant to other women. On her behalf I just want to highlight one heartfelt cause. A college class on racism opened her eyes to the devastating impact of prejudice. Throughout her life, she had a special concern for and affinity with women who coped with the double whammy of sexism and racism. In 1994 she took great pride when CEW created the Women of Color in the Academy Project, which endures today. And in retirement she became an active supporter of Alternatives for Girls, which works to better the lives of marginalized girls in Detroit.
Wherever we traveled, she constantly engaged with local women. She was particularly enamored of women’s folk art. We have a substantial collection from around the world.
Eventually Carol found an artistic muse within herself and she set about making beautiful bead jewelry. We wound up in bead stores all over the world. I had to rush to come up with the Italian word for wholesale when we visited the island of Murano near Venice. She even wound up selling her jewelry through Artistica in Dexter and Abracadabra in Ann Arbor. So now we’re rich.
Now Carol was not one of those people who have a life-long burning desire to be a mother. For many years we thought we would not have children, and then we changed. She was not obsessed with her children. But she loved and enjoyed them. Anthony and Evelyn will tell you that she did not hesitate to provide advice and guidance… and instructions and rules and commandments. But they knew to push back and she was gratified by the independence that they showed and the lives they built for themselves. She was proud of Anthony’s stunning paintings as well as his initiative in starting a furniture manufacturing business. She was proud of Evelyn’s poetry and her career as a burlesque dancer as well as her eventual decision to become a children’s librarian.
One amusing theme of her advice to the children was how to stay safe and healthy. Fall through the ice, have an untreatable infection, try to swim to the island, eat a tainted apple. You could hardly pick a potential danger, without Carol relating the story of someone she knew who had died in that way. Anthony once mentioned a podcast on rabies and added “I suppose mom knows someone who died of rabies.” She replied, “actually I do.” All of this fear was compounded by a grandmother enraptured with Google’s ability to find exotic diseases to fit mundane symptoms.
One of the best things Carol did for the children and her nephews was to be a model of a mother balancing the competing priorities of life. Parents constantly make trade-offs and compromises - you really can’t have it all. But she came damn close. And I think it’s fair to say that she made them all feminists. Let’s go a step further, she also made me a feminist.
Family was always important to Carol. Neill has told you how close we all were. She was also blessed by one special addition to her family – our niece, the unstoppable Lori Walters. Lori lived with us for quite some time and she and Carol became especially close. The two made a formidable team. When they got set on a project, I knew better than to try to interfere.
So we come to the cancer.
She opted to ignore the prognosis and focus on treatment and living. The inevitable end did not detract from her enjoyment of the time she had. Our slogan from the beginning was carpe anno, seize the year. In the 11 years following her metastatic diagnosis we spent 13 days in Honduras, 14 days in Utah, 19 days in Vail, 21 days in Bhutan, 25 days in Indonesia, 64 days in Florida, 66 days in New York, 121 days in Arizona, 135 days on cruise ships, and 228 days in Italy. Right up to the end, she managed to grab one more thing after another.
So this is lesson number three of Carol’s life. She understood what Martin Luther King called the fierce urgency of now. Not carpe diem. You don’t need to make every day be the best day it can be. But carpe anno. Make THIS year be the best year it can be. Then if you can, do it again next year. We managed to do it for 11 years in a row. It is a lesson that I, for one, intend to honor for as long as I’m here.
To Carol’s great credit, she never pressed her children to hurry up with grandchildren. Even after her cancer turned out to be metastatic, she remained calm and cool. Her patience was rewarded as she lived to see and enjoy all four of her grandchildren. She had wonderful times with Omar as we swiped him from his parents. She loved reading to Abe who constantly brought books to her and climbed up in her lap. She savored Lola, who did everything faster than either of the boys. Lola is really the one channeling Carol. The only girl among 8 children of that generation. We expect Lola to rule them all.
Then the final act. When Carol entered hospice, Evelyn’s due date was still four weeks away. The expert opinion was that Carol would not survive to see his birth and that she was even unlikely to make it to her 69th birthday. As you can imagine, this compounded our grief at losing her. But - nevertheless, she persisted. And for the first time, but probably not last time, Fin stepped up. Two weeks early he decided it was time to get out and he was born the day before her birthday. Evelyn channeled her mother’s determination and persistence to browbeat the hospital into releasing her the next day. Carol’s final birthday was spend surrounded by the love of all of her children and grandchildren.
Best day of my life.