We visited Ann Arbor together every year of our marriage, the city where Jean was born, grew up, and went to college. In June I returned by myself to participate in a celebration of her life, organized by friends from her college days. Not everyone could arrange to fly out for the California memorial, but big loss needs its rituals and ceremonies. The solution her friends came up with was a summer celebration, allowing four months of healing before and time to make plans.
The event would have meant a lot to her. Not the least of Jean's gifts was a knack for friendship, and she burned no bridges when she moved to California in 1987. We had occasional visitors from Michigan, and some of our favorite times visiting Ann Arbor were dinners with Will and Ellen, thrift store excursions with Amy, and hanging out at bookstores with Shadie . Ellen, Yao, Laurie, Shadie and Amy came out to help us on Wood St. last November, in that terrible time when Jean became heavily symptomatic. They and many other kept in close contact after Jean entered the Zen hospice, and her friends' voices, coming from a phone held to her ear, were some of the last voices she heard on her last day. These same voices shared stories at her celebration, or tried to talk through tears.
I shared too. My story was about stories, Jean's tales of her college days and the accomplishments and foibles of her friends. In my imagination, Ann Arbor was a charmed place, and her college friends were larger-than-life. And Jean carried the glow from those days to the very end. As we grown-ups know, it's fine to proclaim lofty ideals, to harbor creative ambitions -- but as Shadie pointed out, life gets busy, there's the mortgage to pay, work is exhausting, and it's tempting to tune out out the pain of others and just come home and find something diverting on TV. But Jean was working hard on her novel when the brain tumor struck, and her heart opened wide to her family, friends, and even strangers who importuned her on the street. All that, plus an impish smile -- being good, smart, and creative mean much more in the presence of joy. And then the tears got me, had to stop.
The pictures of the speakers are below, along with brief descriptions, and bits and pieces of my memory of their words. Below that are pictures of a gathering at Will and Ellen's house, the night before the celebration. And for the very interested, below that are some closing thoughts from me, trying to make sense of the event, trying to console myself with thoughts like I was lucky to have a great marriage to lose.
 |
Gathering for the memorial. Front row Ray Lewis; next row Laurie
Abbott; next row Anne Lewis; back row from left to right: Phill Stoll, Pat Sutton,
Yao Louis, Yao's daughter Sally, and Yao's sister and mother;
walking in back: Jeff Taras. |
 |
| Babak "Shadie" Rowshan |
Shadie has been a close friend of the Lewis family for many years, and just recently moved to the nearby town of Dexter, after over over three decades in Ann Arbor. His financial acumen and integrity made him a trusted advisor to the Lewis family, and well appreciated in his circle of friends.
Shadie talked about how busy life can be, with demands coming from all directions. What we achieve is always less than what we wanted to do, and with much undone, some of what we actually accomplish gets lost in the shuffle. In this light, Shadie recounted one of Jean's incidental gardening triumphs. Shadie told how he met Jean when she was trying bone meal fertilizer to grow flowers with divergent diurnal rhythms, morning glories and moonflowers. It worked, and to this day he thinks her morning glories were the most glorious, her moonflowers the most luminous, of any he has ever seen.
 |
| Anne Lewis |
Anne Lewis, MD is a retired Radiation Oncologist and a brain tumor survivor. She lives in West Palm Beach Florida.
Anne's guest book inscription read "Jean was the most wonderful sister, and a beautiful dear friend. The memorial was lovely and loving." At the memorial, she talked about the coolly competent Jean, who never bragged about how good she was at her job, but whose demanding perfectionism made her well appreciated as a technical editor. Anne only realized that Jean wrote and edited Environmental Impact Statements (EIS) after Jean had entered the Zen hospice, receiving a steam of visitors from devoted engineering colleagues. Anne was impressed when Jean's manager said that Jean would tell her what needed to be included in an EIS, and when another colleague, with an international reputation in his field, said that he wanted only Jean to edit his reports.
 |
| Ray Lewis |
Raw Lewis is Jean's younger brother, and the only one of the Lewises still living in Ann Arbor. He wrote in the guest book "Anne & Matt worked really the make the service a success. It was good to see some old faces like John H. and the Hunts, among others." At the memorial he talked about how generous Jean was, how she bought him two pairs of dress shoes, and knit him his white cap with blue stripes. He is also grateful that Jean resumed the family tradition of going to Camp Michigania every year, a practice that Ray now continues on his own.
 |
| Phil Stoll |
Phil Stoll is a musician with the Cleveland Orchestra, a software engineer who has weathered many changes in that volatile industry, and first met Jean in Ann Arbor Unitarian Sunday school. He also talked about how generous Jean was. One gift in particular that shines in his memory was a sweater she knitted for him. In return, Phil commissioned a sculptor to make a bronze bust of her head, but that project never got further than clay. So Phil tried sewing a multi-colored dress for her himself, but that didn't work either. At the time Jean was into black, ironically considering how much she came to love iridescence. She didn’t like wearing the dress.
Phil also talked about the political Jean. She was a Russian major at U of M at a time when a university press was an important publisher of dissident literature. Jean saw herself as contributing to the battle against censorship. Phil also mentioned one of her endearing traits: Jean was a procrastinator. In college she had a shelf full of books that she intended to read, but had not yet found the time to do so. But Jean was also determined, full of intellectual curiosity, and an avid reader. She eventually did get to those books.
 |
| Phil playing fiddle |
And Phil brought his fiddle with him, and played two pieces. One of them was the haunting "Two Rivers," the opening waltz at Jean and Matt's wedding reception, and the song played as the mourners gathered at Jean's memorial service in California.
 |
| Laurie Abbott |
Laurie Abbot, Ph.D., is an associate professor of Animal and Range Sciences at the University of New Mexico in Las Cruces. She and Jean became friends in the late 1970s when they were both undergrads at U of M, sharing a room at the Nakamura co-op in Ann Arbor. Laurie has had her own bouts with life-threatening illness, and last year she took the time, in the week before Thanksgiving, to come to Wood St. and help care for Jean. She called on Jean's last day, saying a few final words of appreciation while the phone was held to Jean's ear.
Laurie talked about the Jean so full of life, carrying away friends with her infectious enthusiasms. In particular, she reminisced about their wild, adventurous days at Nakamura, where Jean was one of the first in their crowd to participate in the "Rocky Horror Picture Show" scene. Laurie recalls coming into their room, seeing Jean in Rocky Horror regalia, and exclaiming "girl what you doin'?!" (or the the '70s equivalent). She soon found out and joined in.
 |
Yao Louis, with Anne Lewis for support,
wearing a Jean Lewis Brain Tumor Walk t-shirt |
Mei-yao Louis, DVM, has a veterinarian practice in Watertown, South Dakota. Yao and Jean became friends at Huron High in Ann Arbor, and that friendship blossomed when they were undergrads at U of M, after Yao encouraged Jean to move into the Nakamura co-op. They remained close friends to the end. She was with Laurie helping out at Wood St. last year, and Yao's voice was one of the last Jean heard on her final day.
In the guest book Yao wrote "This was a beautiful memorial to Jean." At the memorial, she had difficulty speaking through the tears, but did say there was something, some intrepid exuberance, that made her good friend very special. Yao tells an exemplary story about a trip to the Southwest when they were U of M undergrads. After setting up camp in the dessert, Jean insisted on going out and looking for geodes -- she had a guide book that said they could be found in the environs. Yao was skeptical that such a barren landscape concealed such beauty, and if it did, that rank amateurs would be able to find it. But Jean returned with grey rocks, whose insides shone and sparkled when she split them apart. For Yao, that transcendence: barren landscape to grey rocks to crystals - expressed much about Jean's presence in the world.
That same transcendence came into play in a more personal way, when Jean helped Yao through her own time of terrible loss. Again this happened when they were both undergrads, sharing post-Nakamura accommodations in a place known in their circle as the Ann Street house. Jean organized a house band, and cajoled Yao into performing with them; she organized dinner parties where the band performed, serving champagne and ice cream to appreciative guests. Grief into music and champagne: transcendence there too, of a bubbly kind that played its role in restoring Yao's appetite for life.
 |
| Amy Garber |
Amy Garber works in diabetes outreach education in Ann Arbor, and is also interested in metaphysics and does spiritual readings. She and Jean met in the mid-1980s when they were both copy editors together at Mathematical Reviews. She visited us in Alameda in 1998, after our wedding, and we always looked forward to dinner and thrift shopping with Amy when we visited Ann Arbor. Last December she came to Wood St. to help out, after Laurie and Yao had gone home, and called Jean at the hospice when the end was close. Drawing from her spiritual practice, she told Jean to go to the light, that there was nothing to be afraid of.
Amy remembered the quirky Jean, unselfconsciously enjoying offbeat things. She gave the example of going to the California State Fair with us in 1998. Amy also praised Jean's open, eclectic, mind, remembering how Jean encouraged her when she first started getting interested in metaphysics in the early 1990s.
