Louise Marx  of San Luis Obispo,  died at the age of 94 on Wednesday January 19 2005 at a San Luis Obispo Care Center after several years of failing health. She was a devoted and loving wife and mother.

Louise (or Lise) was born in Stuttgart Germany September 6, 1910, daughter of Adolph and Mathilde  Gruenwald.  After the early death of her mother, she was raised by her father and stepmother Paula, who bore three siblings,  Hannelore, Gabrielle,  and HansPeter.  She attended public  and private schools in Germany and Switzerland where she learned English,  French and Spanish, and she also completed two years of business college.  During the early 1930’s she moved to Berlin to work for a sheet music publisher and to be near her fiance, Henry Marx, businessman.  Because the Nazi regime outlawed Jewish marriages, she and Henry married in secret in 1934.

Louise and her husband emigrated to New York City in 1937 and after one year brought his mother from Germany to live with them.  Her father, stepmother and siblings fled Germany to Sao Paulo Brazil, where the family continues to reside.  She worked as a secretary and then parttime as a masseuse after their son Steven was born in 1942. Besides serving as a Den Mother for the Cub Scouts, she was active in Hadassah, the Jewish women’s service organization, and was one of the founders of the Riverdale Bronx Chapter.

When their child left home, she worked  as a secretary for physicians,  scholars, the Jewish agency and the Leo Baeck Institute.  Later she tutored elementary school students in Harlem and attended to veterans in hospitals. In 1972 Louise and Henry retired to Denver Colorado, taking full advantage of its opportunities for hiking and skiing. She volunteered and took several Community College courses. In 1989 they moved to San Luis Obispo to live near their son and his family.  Here she continued  to do volunteer work and to take college courses, now at Cal Poly.  Her husband of 63 years died in 1995. Shortly before he died,  she completed  a memoir of her life experiences that spanned most of the twentieth century.

Louise Marx is survived by her sisters Hannelore and Gabrielle,  her son Steven and daughter in law Jan Howell Marx, her grandchildren Joe and Claire,  and her greatgrandchildren Ian Fisher and Ethan Marx.

Louise Marx: September 6 1910”January 19 2005

I wake up at 3:30 am  praying for Lise’s smooth passage, knowing the end is near.  When the alarm goes off at 5:30 I feel weak and vulnerable from a lingering cold that  I suspect results from teaching anxiety,  stage fright about two presentations last week,  and unconscious stress from the impending end.  Instead of my regular swim,  I  take a hot bath to relax tense muscles and  reduce sinus pressure.  I decide to wear a white shirt, tie and sport jacket and carry a cell phone to work in case the call should come today.  My morning meditation brings a burst of tears when I think of Jan and the transiency of life.

I give my all to the morning composition class and a lecture on Shakespearean  tragedy. When it’s over at noon, I’m drained but exhilirated.  As students leave the room, the phone rings in my pocket.  A person at the nursing home reports that Lise has just died.  I say I’ll be there soon.  I phone Jan while walking to my office; she’s just pulling up to Cabrillo to check on Oma on her way to the gym.  I tell her the news and she comes to get me.  I reluctantly decide not to try to get back in time for my 1:30 class and ask the secretary to run a videotape of Othello for the students to watch.

We enter Cabrillo for what may be the last time, the odor more pungent than usual.  Josephine, the reserved  nurse’s assistant who tended my father Henry in 1995 and who has been with my mother for the last four years,  is tearful and gives me a hug.  Curtains are closed around Lise’s bed.  She lies flat, skin silken smooth, facial bone structure,  nose and closed eyes in fine relief: a perfected mask.  There is still color in her cheeks and warmth  on her brow.   She feels receptive to my stroking and comfortable with my presence for the first time in many years, the ever- thickening wall between us now departed along with her spirit.  I feel free to start replacing the resistant body and resentful soul that it irked me to call Mom with  memories of the delight I enjoyed in her presence as a young boy”the one she called “Schlumbie.” Those memories have been recalled lately when  I am with  Ian,  our three year old grandson.

We sort through the closet and nightstand, selecting the few items to keep, the rest to leave in the communal  pool of nursing home laundry, hearing aids and spectacles.  Long ago we’d liquidated Lise’s condo and then her unit in the Assisted Living facility at Garden Creek. While Jan takes a load to the car, I go to the storeroom to find the scissors I used to cut the stem bottoms off the flowers I brought every week.  I clip a lock of her white  hair, which is still thick and wavy.  The empty hearing aid box I place it in slips into my pocket.  By 1:15 we  leave  through the main lobby making no eye contact with  those remaining.

At home,  I collapse on the bed, sleep for an hour and then walk to Cal Poly for my 2:50 office hour.  Thankfully nobody shows up, and I meet Jan at the Benefits Office at 4:00 for a long planned conference with the retirement  counselor.  We spend an hour figuring out how to maximize the monthly sum we will receive until our deaths.  Neither of us mentions that we have just come into an inheritance.  Right now,  loss means gain.  May it be so too for Lise.

We walk home and I nap again,  then call our son Joe.  He knew this was coming,  and finds words to amplify the positive that  we  no longer need to think of her as the presence in the nursing home, the wraith awaiting transport across the river, but as someone we can remember fondly.  There will be no funeral or memorial,  though he’d be willing to come  for one.  He suggests a scattering of ashes on a mountain  in the Rockies, which she and Henry made their own, when we visit in March.

I phone our daughter Claire, who has asked about Oma at one of our infrequent encounters.  I leave a message suggesting this might be an occasion for her and Jan and me to get together for the first time in a year.

As evening comes on I feel briefly energized for the task of remaking Mother,  of undoing some of her last ten years.  It was at the memorial for Henry in November 1995 that she said her life was over.  A year before that she concluded her autobiography, “My Story.”  I will go back to it, add some scanned photos and print a second edition.

Jan and I go to Tsurugi’s for Sushi dinner and walk in the dark along the creek downtown.   We share our sense of the solemnity of the day, of our own mortality,  of the awareness that gain also means loss. Recent long-needed rainstorms have caused the creek to crest and wipe out a large chunk of the bank.  The fence protecting the natural riparian vegetation will have to be moved  back.

When we  get home there is a voice message: Ethan, our two year old grandson in Idaho, warbles  “Hello Boppa, Hello Boppa, I love you.” It’s the first time he’s spoken to me on the phone.  This is followed by expressions of sympathy from Amy his mom.  A few minutes later,  Claire calls and agrees that we three should meet.  We are,  as always during these conversations,  halting, guarded, over polite.

I open the packet that had arrived in the morning from British Columbia.  It’s Steve and Juliet’s Christmas letter and photo calendar loaded with pictures of  Lund folk– including three generations of Marxes–and news of deaths and grandparenthood among our contemporaries.

I dig in the closet and find the pictures that Jan had put together for Lise and Henry’s sixtieth anniversary showing them in their twenties and eighties,  radiant in both pairs.  I set them on the bureau and get into bed with “My Story,” which I havent  looked at since editing and typing it with her.  For an hour, I read and marvel  and pity and laugh.

Things turning brown with no watering.  Not the holly-leaf cherry and the bamboo, which remains after the removal of the hot tub.  Too much noise, maintenance, energy.  But we’ll miss it too. The side yard with redwoods remains damp, the front yard still showy with native blooms.  Next door gardeners have been digging and planting for the last two days, talking cheerfully, playing the radio.  The grounds are being transformed from a wasteland of ivy to varied panoply of large shrubs and trees. Brian arranged for all of this before last Tuesday.  They become his memorial.  His widow doesn’t come out but her light is on at night.  They came here from San Jose, after he sold his lucrative business and she retired as police officer.  Planned to have children.  Another young widow joins Amena and Barbara B.

Kenton’s camera back arrived yesterday, the lens I ordered today.  Together they weigh five pounds.  The shutter action, the zoom lens, the image stabilizer.  I’ve been told by Mary I must shoot slides.

Summer quiet back here.  Wind in the pines on top of the hill sound like ocean, finches like canaries.  There’s time to work on Polyland book

Atop the Citadel.  A perch on a flat piece of grassland 30 yards from the lone oak noticeable from all over poly canyon. Last time I was here a Yom Kippur years ago it was too windy to stay; now a gentle sea breeze in the oat grass, the last sun on my pants a weakening gold.  It will get chilly but I have a down vest, windbreaker and sleeping bag.  I’ve been snacking on cheese and gorp.

Fathers Day lunch was delicious barbeque.  I had to carry Oma up the stairs then her change her horrendously stinky diaper, but then she was fine and quietly watched the baby and ate with gusto.  Ian is the glowing center of joy for all the old and youngish folks, bringing us together in delight and concern.  Jan and I had a great Sunday morning and I phone Mary L. to discuss working on the book again.  Yesterday was graduation.  I felt (a little) honored rather than humiliated and invited to a party at the house of Bob and Sarah.  Afterwards Jan and I took a hike up a new trail in Reservoir Canyon where the flowers were splendid: yuccas, Obispo lilies, California fuschia, fairy bells, lizard tails, buckwheat and monkeyflower. Sun dropping to the horizon.

This morning I washed the windows.  I concluded that the poppy seeds are hurled as projectiles off those formerly pink launch pads.  I sat on the bench and planned to wait for the hurl.  I was thinking about sleeping out tonight when I heard a weird click, looked to my right and saw what I thought was a grasshopper leaping through the poppy patch. Click and leap.  Then I realized it was what I was waiting for: the poppy seed dispersal.  Sure enough, where the grasshopper landed, about five feet from the path, there was a split seed hull.  When Jan came home a few minutes later, I asked her to sit next to me and told her what happened.  She said, “that’s why they’re called poppies.”  Is all seed dispersal ejaculation?

9 PM  I’m awakened by the train whistle from a deep snooze.  Hollister’s top protrudes above the line of fog.

After I returned from taking Oma home from the party, a beautiful read haired woman came out on the neighbor’s new driveway and greeted me.  I said something about the weather.  She said Brian died a few days ago, under “special circumstances.” Turns out he drove up Cayucos dam road and shot himself because the rare form of liver cancer he was diagnosed with is incurable.

The train at Stenner is now very loud.  I look back at the spot by Rockslide Ridge where I watched and heard it a month ago.  The moon is a thick crescent and Venus is to the west.  I brought the star chart, but am sleepy.  No other stars.  My mission here is to get to Caballo and reshoot the central campus and Brizzolara drainage at dawn.

Her birthday has been the occasion of mixed feelings for Lise.  Its celebration of the privilege of one more year of being alive has been mixed with associations of great loss–the loss of her mother on this day as a young girl and of her husband, nearly a year ago, when he stood with us here leading a toast.

The period since her last birthday has been difficult and dramatic for Lise–a kind of death and rebirth in itself.  It started with her loving and strong support of Henry in his last days and her courageous carriage at the memorial celebration.  That changed to a time of numb and disoriented acquiescence to her loss which climaxed in her dangerous automobile accident last January.  This was followed through the spring and summer by a slow and steady movement toward rebuilding a life as a single person supported by her friends and family.

Today marks a milestone in that recovery–the fact that we are here despite those terrible losses in a mood of festivity.  We’re celebrating Lise’s continuing good health, physical, mental and emotional.  We’re celebrating the fact that she’s made it through what she expected would be a great ordeal– the three week absence of her son and daughter-in-law. We’re celebrating that it turned out not to be such an ordeal after all because it brought her closer to all of you, her dear friends, and to her grandchildren, Claire and Joe.  We’re celebrating most of all to recognize that she owns her life and that with her continuing health and positive outlook, it’s a very precious possession–both hers and ours.  Le Chaim!

Welcome and thanks for coming today, on behalf of Lise, Henry’s wife, Jan his daughter in law, Joe and Claire, his grandchildren. I’m Steven, his son.

We’ve been amazed by the magnitude of the public tribute to him and the outpouring of sympathy and appreciation–from Denver, where he lived for fifteen years before moving to San Luis Obispo, from New York, from all around the world.

He was a little guy with a large presence; Paula Huston said to me the other day that he’ll be missed by the whole county. Another colleague, Barbara Hallman came up to me yesterday to express condolence with tears in her eyes. I asked her how she knew him. “His letters to the paper, I’ll miss them,” she said.
Grief makes you want to retreat and hide to nurse your wound. Its hard to share with so many people in so public a way.The good and pure memories we want to hoard, the jealous and critical feelings we want to hide, and the stupefying mystery of death itself we want to deny.

But Jan and Lise and I nevertheless decided on the day he died to hold this gathering. For the immediate family, it’s a way to distribute the pain, it’s asking for your comfort, it’s an antidote for our tendency to withdraw into isolation

For all of us, its a chance to make up for some of the loss we feel to our community by pooling our regard for Henry and building a lasting monument to him in our memories.

The reason we’re in the Y today is not only because of the graciousness of the managment and the fact that it has a large room and lots of parking space. Henry used to say that going to senior aerobics at the Y twice a week was his religion. He was only half joking.

Since his adolescent involvement with the German youth movement, he believed in worshipping the temple of the body. Fitness was his credo. He treasured his health, and he saw that maintaining it was his own business. Working out here made him feel good and counteracted his tendencies toward depression about current events. The idea of senior aerobics fit his attitude toward old age and the approach of death in general–affirming what you still have, rather than regretting what you’ve lost.

The first tolling of his bell occurred here. Heading home for lunch after his workout on May fifth, he drove out of the parking lot, down Southwood, Laurel Lane and Orcut to the intersection and then made a left turn instead of a right on Broad street. An hour later, the Park Rangers found him disoriented, spinning his wheels near the ocean in the Nipomo dunes.

After they brought him home, he had a series of seizures, but with medication and a couple of weeks rest, he was recovered enough to be back in this room on a regular schedule, and in July, he insisted that I join him one day to exercize and to meet his friends.

I came back here with Henry in mid October. Two weeks after being diagnosed with terminal brain cancer, he was staying in the Cabrillo nursing home, a block away, on Augusta Street. It was a warm afternoon and I took him out in a wheelchair to the nearest place one could appreciate the air and see some green. It was the park right outside. We sat together in the shade of the Eucalyptus trees and talked about native and imported plant species, about medicare, about the privilege of living in this town. It was our last sustained conversation, the last time he was out of bed.

I felt blessed to be able to take many farewells from my father during his monthlong departure from this world. One of the most memorable occurred when he talked about his grandparents, and how their presence was so strong with him during those last days. Then he cried bitterly and said he didnt want to die. Without thinking, I replied that he would remain, just as his grandparents existed in him at that very moment. He nodded and pulled me to him. With all of us here now I say, goodbye Henry, and I say you are still here in the memories and the legacy of the good you leave behind.

Henry Marx, 88, of San Luis Obispo, died Tuesday October 31 at a San Luis Obispo Care Center. A memorial gathering will be held at the YMCA Fitness Facility, 1020 Southwood Drive, San Luis Obispo, at 3:00 P.M. Saturday November 11.

Mr. Marx was born in Strassburg Germany, April 19, 1907. He was an enthusiastic participant in the Kameraden, a youth organization dedicated to the appreciation of nature and the arts, to ethical idealism, and to humanitarian service. He married Lise, his wife for 63 years, in Stuttgart Germany in 1932. In 1937, to flee Nazi persecution, they emigrated to New York City, where he worked in business until retirement at age 65. He and Lise then moved to Denver Colorado, where they enjoyed skiing and hiking. In 1989 they settled in San Luis Obispo to reside near the family of their only child.

Mr. Marx was a committed community volunteer throughout his life. In New York he was active in the Democratic party, neighborhood synagogue and Sane Nuclear Policy organizations. In Denver he served as president of the Jewish Community Center, as an officer in the Retired Senior Volunteer Program, and as a tireless visitor to elementary schools, where he presented slide shows about places around the world he had visited. His efforts were recognized with a Senior of the Year award, a Community Volunteer award, and an Americans by Choice award.

In San Luis Obispo, Mr. Marx continued his volunteer work into his late eighties. He gave talks and slide shows in high schools, junior highs and at Cal Poly in order to pass on his experiences as a witness to the Nazi Holocaust as a reminder and a warning to the younger generation. He was a Hadassah associate and a docent at the Arts Center. Mr. Marx’s hobbies also produced contributions of energy to community organizations. He was a member of the YMCA Senior Aerobics Club and the Art Center’s Thursday Painters Group.

Mr. Marx is survived by his wife, Lise, his son, Steven, and daughter-in-law, Jan Howell Marx, and his grandchildren, Joe Montgomery Marx and Claire-Elise Grace Marx.