Nancy Lucas 1942-2021
On Sunday attended a memorial service at the Sangha for Nancy Lucas, my age. Retired before me, about 2006. Lost contact as part of my withdrawal from English department but heard that seven years ago she was moved by her two sons out of SLO to an Alzheimer facility where the older one lives in Healdsburg. They organized the memorial at White Heron Sangha in Avila because she was an early member who left before I first got there. The event was announced through the Sangha email list, but not, it seems, through the English Department. I had the impression a number of those folks, who were closer to her than I, had been personally invited, but many others were absent.
This is the third memorial for Sangha members I’ve been to: Barbara Scott, Melody Demerit, the two others. Women I had special connections with—Barbara my therapist in 1992 and Melody my copy editor in 1998 and 2005. Those connections were mixed with admiration: Barbara for bravery in dealing with the unimaginable pain of her rheumatoid arthritis, Melody for her steadfastness in serving on the Morro Bay City Council. And affection: Barbara for her ebullience, Melody for her bluff irreverence.
With Nancy it was different. The most prominent thing about her was a spectacular beauty and grace. Her head, with its great green eyes and bright red hair, seemed to float with a buoyancy that suspended the rest of her tall body. Her voice, with its slight hint of Texas drawl, seemed to sing recitative rather than talk. And as so many of the speakers remarked, she fully shared that celebrity presence with everyone who basked in it. An illustration in that place of a Buddhist aspiration to be fully there for other people.
And a poignant irony that someone so present lived out her life growing steadily more absent. So absent that the two adored and adoring sons who took her in care remembered, in lengthy detail, her rare moments of partially being there in laughter and song.
A picture of her at our house October 1991 during an English Faculty play reading of Sheridan’s The School for Scandal together with Mike Wenzl (1939-2017)