Mary Christensen

Obituary

Written by Karen Fisher

It’s so hard when someone is suddenly gone. Their disappearance seems to wipe out, for a while, everything, it’s like some kind of natural protective shock kicks in and for a while there’s only the horror of having lost someone, mixed sometimes with guilty relief and frustration, because that was really hard, dying is really hard, for everyone. For a while I couldn’t remember who Mom was, or anything she’d said or done, or why. Then that shifts and suddenly the fog clears. The fog cleared for me about a week ago and I woke up in the middle of the night and remembered everything, and suddenly I could feel the aha, aha, of being close again to her, and knew what I wanted to say. About who she had been for me, and what she had tried to teach me. It’s hardest of all I think to see our own parents objectively. By nature, our children are both the closest to us and most oblivious and resistant and subjective and therefore unable to see us. It has taken me a lifetime, more than a lifetime, to begin to understand my parents.

Who was this woman who was my mother?

One of the first things I knew was that Mom’s mom had been an only child. Betty’s mother had been a teacher, she married at forty, and had this one child, and it was a very austere household. My grandmother always said how hard she’d worked to be a better mother, though I never really knew what that meant. But she did take classes in cooking and in child development. I remember Mom’s mother as ferociously intelligent and somewhat anxious. She shared my love of horses, and told me that when she was young in Montana she’d gone to horse shows, and she’d been jumping a course when her horse fell, but she got up and got back on her horse, and finished the course, and one young man who was watching her decided that was the woman he wanted to marry, so he did. My grandpa Finley was an engineer for the Army Corps of Engineers, and my mom was soon the oldest of three children. Jim and Alan are her brothers.

Mom told me her favorite place when she was young was her grandfather’s farm in Corvallis, she remembered the flowers and berries, the vegetables, and the geese flying over, how steady and capable and joyful her grandfather was.

She had rheumatic fever when she was young, and spent a year in bed or resting, and I think this is where her love of reading probably began.

She spent her high school years in Morocco. Her dad was designing airstrips in North Africa after the war, and when he suffered a stroke during a family vacation in Europe, she found herself on a trip alone around Europe with her little brother, both young teens. I think this is when she learned to love travel, and learned to trust people…

My sister Mara remembers Mom telling her that the world is safe. She said, “People are the same everywhere, they all want the same things, to care for their children, and to have meaningful work, and to feel love and belonging.” She said it meant we could go anywhere in the world, because if we got into trouble, there would always be someone ready to help.

Mom majored in Home Economics at Oregon State, because that’s what young women did. During that time, she worked and saved, and after graduation she and her best friend Katie traveled all around Europe.

The next part of the story she told us much later…how she fell in love with someone handsome and charismatic who pretty much left her at the altar…turns out he was already cheating on her before they’d even married. Her parents cancelled the wedding, and she had to start over.

And this is how she ended up in San Francisco, working in a department store, living in a boarding house, Baker Acres, where she was attracted to a man named Don who was also handsome and charismatic, but remarkably he said he wasn’t good enough for her, and steered her toward a different Don, “a really good guy,” who sat down beside her and asked if she’d ever been to Sausalito…

From there, apparently things moved kind of fast, and before long Mom and the Good Don were getting married.

I remember hearing this story and thinking, okay, Dad’s a really good guy, but also kind of boring, right? Like, remarkably boring? So ordinary, so careful. Didn’t Mom want more?

And later when Mara and I were fretting, in our lives, about who we should be, and who we should choose, wanting more and bigger and better, wanting it all, Mom always reminded us.

“There is no all. There is no all.” She meant we’d have to choose what was really important, and accept the rest. In others and in ourselves.

With two small children, and now living on a draughtsman’s salary, earning a living was the most important thing, more important than staying at home, so Mom decided to go back to school to earn a teaching credential. UC Berkeley was just their local university, and they had co-op child care, and that’s where she was recruited by the chairman of a new department, to be one of the first to enroll in Berkeley’s Early Childhood Development program, where she earned a Master’s degree.

In later years I saw video footage of massive protests happening in 1965, when she was studying there, and I said Mom, you were there, right at the epicenter of social change, were you marching, were you holding signs? But no, she said she was too busy, the protesters were just in her way as she was trying to get to class. It turns out that while her fellow students were protesting for civil rights and against the Vietnam war, Mom was part of a quieter revolution, of people rethinking how to raise children. She was part of the Head Start initiative arising in that year, with its focus on including and educating disadvantaged children.

This was all invisible to us, our mom was the only mom, dad was the only dad, it was just ordinary that no one ever yelled at us, or criticized us, or lied to us, or stopped us from trying the things we wanted to try, or told us we were wrong to think what we were thinking, or told us not to ask what we were asking. It was boring. Also weird. No fights, no drama. In a world where everyone seemed to be violently striving to win, to be the best, to be right, in a world full of divorces and war and the threat of annihilation, Mom seemed to want us to be ordinary.

It was ordinary that when Saturday morning rolled around Mom would say, “Let’s go play,” and we’d all have to load up in the car and leave the TV behind and the books and our friends and drive to the beach, or up to the mountains to go hiking. It was ordinary that we all sat down every weeknight and had dinner together, and talked to each other, and said boring things like how was your day. We were the only ordinary family I knew, so naturally I struggled against this, and my sister did too.

Mara who was already beautiful, was struggling to be always prettier, desperate to be more popular, more attractive, but mom would tell her, “Pretty isn’t everything.” She said it was more important to be kind and honest and to work hard.

And I, who already worked hard, was struggling to get the best possible grades, it wasn’t until I was a sophomore that I learned about Valedictorian, but it was too late, I’d already gotten a C in Algebra, and I was so mad, I said Mom, why didn’t you tell me, I’d have worked harder! And she said, “You already work too hard. I didn’t think it would be good for you.”

By that time Mom was teaching other high school students how to be parents and day-care teachers, she taught regional occupation program classes in child care, and we were not interested, I wasn’t going to have children, I was going to be extraordinary. Dad was designing ordinary buildings around town, not for wealthy people who wanted grand custom homes, but solid simple civic buildings, that everyone could use, a YMCA, a fire hall, a credit union, remodeling the auditorium, he was always on time and under budget and gave people not some extraordinary vision, but just exactly what they wanted. So they elected him president of the Hanford improvement Association. And that was just Mom and Dad.

When I left for college and my room was empty, Mom thought it would be good to have a foreign exchange student. Marie joined them from France, and still calls mom her American Mother, she says: it was a life changing experience for the 18 year old girl I was at the time.

Getting to know Mary, her beloved husband Donald, their daughters Mara and Karen, their hearts, their mindsets, their family lives, their own unique way to care always about others, in their personal and professional lives, their ambition to let people develop into a better self without imposing, yet with principles, solid human values.

Mary was such a fun person to be with, curious, open minded, joyful, leaving no stone unturned and always with an amazing pragmatic mindset considering the glass half full and finding a way forward, what a powerful lady always empowering others, interested in cultures, travels, with a deep respectful love for nature, mountains, flowers... I was so inspired by the life they lived.

I was not inspired, I wanted to change the world, because if we didn’t, we were all going to die. “We’re all going to die!” I said, home from college, where I had encountered this harsh reality, and Mom gently told me that in fact, everyone thinks that, every generation thinks theirs is going to be the last. It’s a phase everyone goes through.

And I’d say, “But no Mom, this isn’t working!”

And she’d gently correct me, “This isn’t working for me.”

And I’d say, “No, Mom, it’s not working for anyone! This is a self-annihilating culture!”

And she’d let me fret, and let me think she was too oblivious, too optimistic, too ordinary to understand. She’d tell me how much she loved me, and how amazing I was, which was boring, because it always happened, she was always telling everyone how wonderful they were.

And to Mara she would say, “What do you win if you win?” Which was another way of saying what do you lose by winning. Which was another way of saying, figure out what you can accept, without letting go of what is really important.

She was always telling us, You’re good enough. You are enough. This life is good enough. We have enough.

She was always telling us, Be who you really are.

I couldn’t understand how anyone could know who they really were, or how my mother could be so satisfied, so optimistic, so open, so loving all the time in such a dangerous and competitive world. How she could be content in this small suburban life, in her little garden, with a few friends, and a little cabin they’d run away to when the valley got too horrible..until one Thanksgiving we were up at this cabin.

By then I’d become a teacher, and had papers to grade, but my new boyfriend and my sister wanted to go for a hike, they planned a long hike and said they’d call us from the lake at around four and we could pick them up. In the afternoon Mom and I went for a short hike. Mom thought my boyfriend was wonderful, very kind and very honest and with a great sense of adventure, and I worried that he was boring, not exceptional, and I said I didn’t want to marry or have children, I didn’t want my life to be trivial, I wanted it to be big, and important, and she listened and didn’t argue.

And four o’clock came and went, and five and six and seven and eight and Mom was crying, it was dark, she was sure they’d died, and at nine my sister called from the lake. Everyone was fine. We drove down to get them, and they were tired, and everyone went off to bed except for Mom, who was still crying, and pouring herself scotch, so I sat up with her on this extraordinary night and hugged her while she cried and she said, “I wish everyone could know about this family. This family is not trivial. There’s nothing trivial about this family.” And she went on for maybe two hours telling me everything she knew about our ancestors, how unlikely it was that any of them had survived, smallpox and Indian attacks and whole families wiped out by typhus or measles, only one child survived, over and over, only one survived, she let me understand that since the origin of life we were here because over and over someone was able to survive for long enough to keep life going. She said, “I don’t know why I had to get drunk to tell you all of this.”

I think that was the beginning of this huge aha, when I began to understand not just who my mother was, but why.

Because what my mother understood, what she was trying to tell me, that I didn’t want to understand, was that we don’t have to justify our existence. Our existence justifies us. Our existence justifies us, it is a miracle that we’re here, on this earth together, so unlikely, so extraordinary, and that is enough.

And what I see now is that this awareness turned my Mom into a kind of giant receiver, so when we, her daughters, were scowling and busy and trying too hard to make our world more perfect, more safe, she was seeing beauty and abundance everywhere, and when we were trying too hard to be more pretty and more loved, or complaining about hate and greed and corruption, she was feeling joy and love everywhere. And when we were trying to get things right, or figure out what was right, so that we could pay it forward, so that we could help people, so that we could save the world, she was just allowing the mystery and the miracle of who we all already were and what we all already had to be enough.

And that meant that Mom was better than any of us, at being safe, and loved, and better than any of us, at making the world a better place.

While most of us care about things, Mom cared for things. She didn’t care about money, she cared for it, she worked enough, and steadily, and was never frivolous, and was always ready and able to share what she had, and always ready to use what she’d earned to enjoy her own life. She and Dad worked and saved and then traveled to Russia and China, to Morocco and Europe, Mexico and Canada, she sewed and painted and gardened and cared for her world and let herself experience its beauty. She didn’t care about people, about what they thought of her, or about status, she cared for them. She told me so often, and I knew she meant it as a great compliment because she said it with such love, she said, “You never change,” and I couldn’t see what she meant. Of course I changed. But now I understand. Mom didn’t believe in original sin, she believed we were all original miracles, that we are all born good, and the world might change us, but that everyone was always just doing the best they could. She meant, I was born good, and that I hadn’t changed. Mom cared for people by seeing their beauty and their goodness, and by seeing what they needed, that she could offer. She often took people in. Caitlin and Jordan, in their twenties, lived with Mom and Dad in Portland for a while, as they looked for jobs and a home of their own.

And Mom never cared about being right, she only cared for what was true, she cared for my truth, and my sister’s truth, and the truths of all her neighbors, regardless of their beliefs, she cared for all the truths in all the books she read, and it turns out that what ordinary truly means is not what I always thought it meant. Ordinary doesn’t mean normal, or boring, or common. Ordinary comes from the Latin word ordiri, which means ready to weave, ordo means all the threads are aligned. Ordinary, in its oldest sense, means aligned.

I think this willingness to be aligned with the world, with others, with what is real and true, requires a kind of courage and openness that maybe helps to explain who my Mom was for me and for so many other people.

Our ordinary childhoods were extraordinary to our spouses, and as we found ourselves being ordinary parents, we listened more to her advice. Mara and Joe remember her saying,

Most kids want to please their parents. Yelling at a child to behave is like trying to drive a car by honking the horn. Don’t try to change your child’s behavior, try to understand it. Learn what’s driving the behavior and you will see what you can change in the environment or in your own behavior that will support the change you want to see.

In her final years of work, Mom taught child development and parenting classes for people who were remanded by the court, for being neglectful or abusive. And of course, instead of judging them, in a world so eager to hand down judgments, instead of correcting them, she taught them how it felt to be loved, what love looks and sounds and feels like. She read them stories, she let them color, she listened to them cry as they described their own difficult childhoods, some of them said that no one had ever read them a story, or given them crayons, or told them they were good. They said, My parents told me, Don’t be smart. By which they meant, obey me, do as I say, don’t talk back. She told them, “Your parents were literally telling you not to be smart. And you were being as good as you could be, can you hear that?” And, yes, they could hear that. She changed so many lives, in her final years, they were the most important years, I think. I wanted her to write a book, and she just shook her head, she said her ideas were ordinary, or maybe it was because she thought that a book could never replace a person, who is there, with another person, responding, and caring for the person they were being right then.

By then Mom and Dad had been married for 50 years, and it was time for speeches. Now I have the little post-it note on which Dad wrote his thoughts and feelings about mom, in preparation. It reads:

Dad, on that day, said that he was like a moth, and she was his light bulb.

Mom’s favorite word, in the end, one of the last words left in her shrinking vocabulary, was amazing. Amazing literally means confusing, and it captures the sense of wonder and delight she still had, even in a world that had become increasingly confusing. She’d spent her life appreciating each moment, it seems, so she was well prepared for this, to live from moment to moment without anything but the ability to be amazed and amazing, generous and grateful, kind and appreciative, honest and trusting. Even in the pain of her final days, the pain of her body and the pain of having to really let go of the life she loved so much, we could still feel her love and her beauty shining through. And I think we all knew she was ordinary and miraculous and so, so, so amazing.