I think continually of those who were truly great...

[ellenkushner]

One of my great reading pleasures is the Sunday New York Times Paid Death Notices.  The lives described therein are remarkable, in column after column.  This week, I was particularly struck by these two:  

Ruth Hung-Fang Tung, age 96:  Her father, Tung Jing-Cheng. . . was a Confucian scholar, and her mother, Grand Duchess Wang Shou-Kun, was the founder and head of a girls school. Professor Tung . . .  graduated from Harbin Normal College for Women, and was the first Government sponsored graduate student to attend Ochanomizu Women's University in Tokyo. To escape the massacres during the Chinese Civil War, she, together with her three infant sons, sought refuge in Japan . . . To supplement her modest academic salary in order to raise her three sons, she wrote poetry, translated books and movie subtitles, and taught Chinese cooking at home and on television. After sending each of her sons to the United States for high school, she joined them there, taught at American University in Washington, D.C., and worked as a researcher in the Chinese Collection of the U.S. Library of Congress . . . . 

Leonard Lazarus, age 100:   born in the Bronx to German immigrants . . . . Leonard's father contracted TB and upon the doctor's advice relocated to the Adirondacks in Saranac Lake. Leonard's mother, Lillie, was very resourceful and found a place big enough, with land, to run a boarding house and for her husband to run a kosher chicken and egg business. . . . . At a young age Leonard helped his parents. He had the largest paper route in the neighborhood and took furs to the rail station for a furrier. . . .  Mr. Lazarus' father died two days after his high school graduation so proud of his son who was the first person in the family to graduate high school. . . . After his father's death, the family relocated back to the Bronx where his mother opened a family grocery business where Leonard worked. One of the customers, Rose, became his first wife. Leonard won a state scholarship to Columbia University at sixteen. He worked for the New York Times and became a soda fountain man in a movie house that showed the first talkie movie with Al Jolson, and then became the manager of the cafeteria at Columbia. . . .. After graduation from Columbia University School of Law during the depression. . . . Leonard represented the bus driver's union, three to four hundred men on strike, and conducted labor negotiations with Mayor La Guardia. . . .

Folks, times are tough.  But they've been tougher.  Life stories like this are in there every week, and I eat them up, and learn from them.

I Think Continually of Those who were Truly Great
Stephen Spender

I think continually of those who were truly great.
Who, from the womb, remembered the soul's history
Through corridors of light where the hours are suns
Endless and singing. . . . .
. . .
The names of those who in their lives fought for life
Who wore at their hearts the fire's center.
Born of the sun they traveled a short while towards the sun,
And left the vivid air signed with their honor.

Comments

[queenbookwench.livejournal.com]

Those are some awesome obituaries--I ought to read the ones in the Post more often.

And I've loved that Spender poem ever since I read it in my literature anthology in high school, up in the front with the 20th century writing that we somehow never got to in class.

[ellen-kushner.livejournal.com]

Even better I love the ones where they go on about what a loving & lovable person the aged departed was, giving wonderful examples . . . I'll have to "clip" some of those, sometime. I do love the way the Lazarus one ends with the suggestion that "In lieu of flowers" friends make "a contribution to one of Mr. Lazarus' favorite charities or a similar charity of your choice."

[queenbookwench.livejournal.com]

Yeah, it's the little details.

There's actually a whole book on obituaries and obituary writers, written by the same person who wrote This Book is Overdue, a paen to librarianship.

Not a subject I am in any way biased about ;).

And I love hearing about radical, kick-ass old people; I know a few in real life & they inspire me so much.

[badverb.livejournal.com]

Thanks for posting those. I'm sitting in a chilly Bronx apartment having just called the super because there's no hot water and the radiators are cold to the touch, so I think our boiler must be broken again ... but on the other hand, I know where my next meal is coming from, and I am wrapped in a blanket so fluffy I can't tell it apart from the cat who's sitting on my feet.

[ellen-kushner.livejournal.com]

Heavens above! Hope you get h&hw soon.

[badverb.livejournal.com]

Oh, thank you, that's so kind of you. The landlords are pretty good about getting it fixed promptly when this happens, and I am reasonably sure it will be taken care of by lunchtime tomorrow, so I'm not dreadfully worried. I have a very hazy understanding, but the boiler itself is only about 8 years old. The issues, I think, are with the steam pipe and radiator network, which is much older and sometimes causes the beast in the basement to sort of ... eat its own tail. (It's a good thing I do not work in this industry.)

But I did find those obituaries gave me a sense of perspective about a situation that had me on the verge of boiling over myself.

[heavenscalyx.livejournal.com]

When my grandmother died in 2003, I broke the family tradition of passive, silent Catholicism and insisted on doing a eulogy where I could talk about something like these stories -- obits are usually so darned boring! (And priest-delivered eulogies are even more boring.) Good for the people who want to share some of their family stories!

Thinking About Obits

[(Anonymous)]

I remember once asking my now deceased mother-in-law why she persisted in her daily obituary reading. "You're so morbid!" I added. "Well, I knew that person(s)." she mumbled from behind the newspaper, oblivious to my distaste. I'm now her age and seem to have picked up her habit and sentiment. sigh.
Oh, and one other thing: the recurring sad notion that any life, no matter how accomplished and successful one was, can be encapsulated in a paragraph or column of a newspaper that will eventually wrap fish. Ironically, this sentiment encourages me to continue being productive, to make it count now.

[gaedhal.livejournal.com]

The Spender poem made me think of another person
who died this past week -- Spender's lover (for
a time) Reynolds Price. Price's memoir of his
years at Cambridge as a Rhodes Scholar in the
1950's is a favorite of mine and a must read
again!

[ellen-kushner.livejournal.com]

Oo, sounds yummy!

[webcowgirl.livejournal.com]

Great stories, great poem. Thank you.

[t-windling.livejournal.com]

Wow. Inspiring indeed.

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

That poem is right up there with the last paragraph of Middlemarch for me.

[csecooney.livejournal.com]

Who wore at their hearts the fire's center.

Aaaauuugggghhhh!!!

What beautiful obituaries. And what great names. What power is there.

[ariadnesthread.livejournal.com]

Both lives were exemplary, it's clear. And Professor Tung's three sons sound like men of great accomplishment of whom their education-minded mother and grandmother must have been so proud.