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.

At age 88, my father Henry was in good health and spirits, except for an episode of disorientation and seizure in early May. He participated in aerobics at the Y twice a week, was active in community organizations, went sketching regularly with the Thursday painters, and took hikes with me.

At the end of September, he started losing his memory and balance. Without the consent of his primary care physician, he consulted a neurologist, who ordered tests which showed terminal brain cancer. In the hospital for a biopsy, he fell and broke his pelvis after untying his restraints and getting up to pee at night. This injury left him unable to walk or to urinate. In the transitional care center he lost control over his emotions and would often break into tears. Troubled by persecution fantasies and hallucinations, he repeatedly thanked and apologized to those who were looking after him. “This is not me, I’m not myself,” he protested. He asked for a visit from his grandson Joe, who flew in from Idaho for a weekend. One morning when I visited Henry before work, he talked about how present his grandparents were to him now. Then he wept bitterly and said he wasn’t ready to die. To comfort myself, I answered that he would live on in me and in others, including his grandchildren, as much as his grandparents were now living in him.

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My earliest recollection seems to be when I was three years old sitting on my potty on the floor and the earth shook. It was a Sunday morning and there were several members of our family in our apartment in Stuttgart, Seestrasse 65.  It increased my vocabulary by the word, “Erdbeben,” earthquake.  That late in life, at age 80, I would live in earthquake country, California, nobody could foresee.

My next memory is of when my father returned from the office with a bulletin distributed on the streets.  It was August 2, 1914, the beginning of World War I.  There existed no other news media, except for the newspapers delivered a few hours later, going into detail of the assassination of Franz Ferdinand, Archduke of Austria in Sarajevo.  Many of my friends’ fathers were conscripted for military service at the front.  My father was in uniform but not recruited to serve in the trenches, as his health was not good enough.  He suffered from asthma and bronchial conditions. He was employed by a large company which manufactured “Schiesbaumwolle,” used in shooting the cannons on the front.

As the war continued, we had to prepare for aircraft attacks every night by putting warm clothing on a chair next to our beds and toys to take down to the cellar where we spent many evenings.  Anti-aircraft was close to our section in Stuttgart.  As soon as one heard the siren one was supposed to enter the nearest house for shelter.  At home we went to the cellar.  Father had a wine cabinet down there and took the key along to open a bottle for the grownups.  Children got apples which were also stored downstairs.  For us kids it was lots of fun.

Adolf went toboganning with me, we took long walks, and sang together.  The Stuttgart zoo was not far from where we lived.  On one of our visits, I came close to the monkey cage.  I had two pigtails with rust-colored satin bows, and before I knew it, a monkey had grabbed a bow and disappeared with it.  Another day my father asked me what I would prefer, either ride a donkey in the zoo or attend a concert in town.  My answer was, “on the donkey to the concert.”

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