Liz Brucker, left, and me, 1982. “The photograph of us at Mayfair sophomore year is particularly evocative. I was doing things that I love, like folkdancing, and I had my niche at German House. I had good friends. I was working hard in my classes, but it was OK because I liked what I was learning and didn’t worry about the future. Life was filled with music and poetry and fresh things. If I could recapture that feeling that life is good, I would be so happy!” (Liz to the author, 1987)
(This is Blog 2 in the series, The Theology of Small Things).
Today is Liz’s birthday and what I see in my mind’s eye is the two of us with silly smiles walking arm in arm down an avenue on the east side of Manhattan in the early spring of 1986. We had just seen the movie Hannah and Her Sisters and were at that very moment, a moment that I can replay in my mind as long as I am conscious, happy.
It is like that – through memory, we can take slices of a life as thin as paraffin-encased slides of tissue and turn them into rounded wholes, complete in their perfection.
The face of Liz that endures to the public is through the Elizabeth Jeanne Brucker Scholarship Fund of the University of Illinois, intended to provide financial help to a student in the Graduate School of Information Sciences who worked in a library support position. She imagined someone who came from a working class background as she did, her parents German immigrant factory workers in Cleveland.
Liz died more than 25 years ago when we were both 33 of a particularly virulent form of cancer. She had just set her life on a course to stability after years of wandering following her mother’s equally painful death from cancer during our senior year at Oberlin. She was about to get married and I was to be her maid of honor. I ended up as her power of attorney.
When she knew she was dying, she helped to set up this scholarship with colleagues at the university because that was what library school meant to her: a chance to find fulfillment in that one aspect of her life.
After Oberlin, she followed her boyfriend to Berkeley and then to New Haven, working as a secretary. After that relationship ended, she moved to St. Louis to complete a doctorate in German literature at Washington University, including living a year in Tubingen, but left after completing her master’s thesis, realizing she didn’t want to play the tenure game.
“Even though I have been in grad school almost 3 years,” Liz wrote to me from Germany, “I am continually asking myself if I am good enough, smart enough, dedicated enough; and more fundamentally, do I enjoy it, and does it leave me room for the other things in life that I want?”
These details about Liz give only a glimpse of who she really was as a multidimensional human being.
I am reminded of Liz every day. She lives in the heart-shaped door chime she gave me, which jingles delicately every time I open my kitchen door.
It is in the bond between two people where the theology of small things reveals itself.
Liz and I became best friends almost immediately as freshmen. We recognized that we had much in common, from a European background, to insecurities, to a shyness that makes intimate friendships easier. We were both intellectually curious. We felt comfortable expressing our thoughts without fear of seeming “dumb” to the other. We were each other’s cheerleaders.
After she died in 1995, her sister sent me the whole wad of letters I sent to Liz, and I joined them up with my stash to comprise a full correspondence of our philosophies of life, search for love, experiences, and mutual encouragement.
The letters are filled with our struggles to live a meaningful life, to exercise control rather than be blown one way or the other by rejection or rigid rules. Like a centrifugal force, Liz harnessed her mother’s death and her father’s indifference as a wind filling her sail. She navigated passively out of fear of further loss through a “poverty mind-set” as she called it.
“I am fighting against a sense of fragmentation,” Liz wrote to me from Germany in 1987. “Some people think that dichotomy is an inevitable fact of modern life, but I don’t buy it. Why should the ancient Greeks have had this wonderful totality and wholeness, and we get fragmentation? I think that human beings must have always struggled with this problem. It’s just that people give in now and say, ‘Well, what do you expect? We’re all leading our fragmented lives.’”
I saw fragmentation too as a societal problem but I did not feel it personally as she did. Unlike Liz, after college, I could go back home where I could easily and with two feet plunge into a life of “doing.” I wrote pages and pages to Liz about housing court fights, waiting in welfare offices with tenants for hours on end, and asking the “huge abstract questions” about racism and poverty. I was far from recognizing the importance of small things. On the contrary, with each tenant association, I plumbed for root causes that could be solved by sweeping social change.
Reading our letters, I can see how we evolved over the years in trying to make sense of adulthood. Maturity began to look a lot less like a straight line to some mythic end-goal of stability in love and fortune than an acceptance of constant shifting. We continually reevaluated what is truly important.
Liz knew that while education raised a person’s social class, it did not necessarily make them better. For Liz, school was meaningful because the “intellectual life” held the key to “integrating myself as a human being.” “I have less and less ambition to push for the most prestigious grades, awards and positions later on,” she wrote. “I tend to think that I will get the awards and honors if I truly deserve them, and that there are more important things to concentrate on, such as doing a good job as a teacher and being there for the people who are important to me.”
It was 1990 and Liz ultimately abandoned the idea of teaching – or the idea abandoned her. Liz reflected on why it took her so long to complete her thesis:
“It was the sum of a lot of little things, many of which I didn’t have any power to change. I’d like to say it couldn’t happen to me again because I understand what was going on now; but I think the opposite is true. The more I see of life, the more I think that anything can happen to anybody, any time, any place. Luckily, a lot of good things happen to people, too. (I don’t want you to think I’m totally pessimistic about life.) It’s just so unpredictable.”
Paradoxically, it was in wielding my new public policy degree that I recognized the limitations of big thinking. The “little things” Liz mentioned, of circumstances and individual people, embody those larger forces. Securing justice for one human being extends outward to the world.
“I’m beginning to think ‘small’,” I wrote her, newly married and in the Chicago area. “Like we talked on the phone, I like ‘small’ novels that look at just a few characters in limited settings, and where the only ‘boundlessness’ comes in the descriptions of nature, introspection, ordinary situations which may have profound implications for the characters. Sort of like the tenant organizing I did – in homes, not always big marches.”
I think of Liz today on her birthday, a couple of weeks after writing about her to the latest Brucker Scholar. It was emergency surgery, recuperating at our house in 1992, that was her catalyst for change. Liz knew in a way she had not for years what she wanted to do, which was to go to library school.
More little things, fragments, come back to me connected like the reversed film of broken shards rising back to the table as a cup.
Liz and I dreamed of collaborating on a new translation of the poetry of Nelly Sachs. We never did it. I pull out Sachs from my shelf for a clue as to why I keep thinking of Liz, even more so now as we are isolated and surrounded by the sorrow of the pandemic:
Those who live on have clutched at time
Until gold dust was left on their hands
I sift through the gold dust of that day in New York City, 1986, when we saw Hannah and Her Sisters. That was her second trip to see me from New Haven in a week. The first time, Liz had called me, sobbing, “I’ve just broken up with Tim. Can I come over tomorrow?” I met her at Grand Central and we went back to my place. Suddenly she began crying on my shoulder. I rubbed her back and numbly looked out. No one had ever cried to me before.
Last week, I borrowed the DVD from the library to solve the mystery of why I bind that film up with Liz, and why I feel this memory is another clue to a grief I should have moved on from by now.
I got lost in the film, stunned by catharsis. I then rummaged the bottom of my closet and I found it, my 1986 journal. And here it is, why I was as moved today as years ago:
I saw Liz again next Saturday night. We dragged her suitcase to a Chinese restaurant and then to Hannah and Her Sisters, the latest Woody Allen picture. I thought it was great. We left with silly smiles. Woody Allen’s character realizes life’s meaning is not what counts – living does – when he sees Duck Soup.
Hannah’s sisters and husbands and parents saw her as perfect and even yelled at her for “having no needs.” But Hannah gives a most beautiful and poignant look which tells all and, to me, steals the movie: she almost looks like a beautiful Raggedy Ann who needs affection like anyone else.
I get it now.
“The word is ‘friendship,’” Liz wrote to me when we were 19.
“There are a million definitions of that word in dictionaries and saccharine-sweet greeting cards and posters and philosophy books, but one of the most important implications of friendship to me is that whether I agree with what you say/do/think or not, I will listen until I understand and try to be supportive. There are very few things that would turn me away from you. I can’t think of one right now, in fact. So if you feel ‘phoney’ because you want to tell me something or act a certain way around me, but aren’t sure how I’d take it – STOP WORRYING. I’m already attached to you, and I’m the ‘spineless’ sort who lives for such attachments.”
That day in 1986 was itself a whole. That day, Liz and I lived. For a day, we were alive to the whirlwind of ourselves together and as individuals, where meeting one another’s needs is a given and we can conquer absurdity by laughing in its face – or throwing fruit at it. Shimmying like the Marx Brothers in Duck Soup.
