Thoughts on hearing of the passing of Mary 1/8/10

MARY RUTHSDOTTER
10/14/44 – 1/8/10

My friend Mary Ruthsdotter passed this afternoon. She was 65 and we had been friends for over 30 years. I met Mary through a mutual friend in around 1977. She had just moved her husband Dave and daughter Alice to Sonoma County from Los Angeles in pursuit of a better quality of life. They rented a house in Windsor and had a beautiful garden. They later bought a home in Santa Rosa and then moved 10 years ago to a co-housing community in Sebastopol that they helped found.

Mary and Dave’s home became a destination for me every few months. In summer we picked blackberries, went to the county fair, and canoed on the Russian River. We traded gardening tips and political opinions. Over the years I’d rent homes on the river for a weekend or week and Mary and Dave would come for dinner or a hike or boating afternoon. Mary was generous with time as a friend; her visits were not 30 minute affairs, but long afternoons or overnights with trips to the bakery in the morning. We shared a love of fresh food and savored the latest seasonal fruit. I often came home from a visit with a bag of fresh picked fruit or vegetables from their garden.

We liked the county fair for a number of reasons. The Sonoma County fair featured a central garden exhibit each year, organized around a theme. It might be a 3 story high dragon (one of my favorites) or a Disney story. It was always interesting and sometimes spectacular. We liked the sheep dog trials; we liked the county fair junk food and were quite particular about how the cinnamon buns with frosting were supposed to taste. One year Mary got tickets for the rodeo and we wore western shirts and went. Mary was generally up for anything and I’m surprised we never went to a tracker pull. We did go to the classic car show and vote on our favorites. Dave, who’d owned a car body shop for many years and actually knows about cars, admired how they were put together; Mary and I admired the paint jobs, especially the flames down the sides kind. Mary and Alice won prizes at the county fair. Alice for making a doll house; Mary for grapevine pruning. These are the ones I know about; there are likely others.

Mary was a feminist and allowed her beliefs to shape her life. She was one of the founders of the women’s history project and spent years traveling the country advocating for women’s history and training others to share our stories. The first grants to start the history project were written on Mary’s dining room table at the rented house in Windsor. I have tee shirts, posters and a wealth of understanding from my years visiting Mary at work and hearing about her trips and projects. During my last visit with her 10 days ago, I had a cup of tea with her and selected a women’s history project mug to drink from. Besides the history project work, Mary was chair of the Sonoma County Commission on the Status of Women, an aide to her local assembly member, active in ecological and conservation groups. In retirement, she’d begun exploring groups she wanted to volunteer with, looking at the library, the open space groups and others. Her illness took away much of her energy and stamina and cheated us of the leadership she would’ve provided in the last decades of her life.

Mary grew up traveling because her father worked for what I think of as the foreign service. As an adult, she loved to travel and she and Dave (and Alice as a child) truly traveled the world. They spent months in Latin America, Asia and Europe. After she because ill, Mary still managed trips to China, India, Japan, Australia and the US southwest.

In December, I told her I was planning a trip to Oxford and she pulled out Rick Steve’s map and put post-it arrows on a half dozen spots she and Dave had visited and I should see. She was the perfect person to talk about travel with; she was interested in spending time in and getting to know a country. She read about and watched videos about travel and was planning a trip to see her aunt Virginia in the southwest this spring. We’d also been discussing Montana and she’d been looking at historic lodges to stay in.

I went on the trip to China with Mary and Dave and I couldn’t keep up with her. If there was an extra outing: to a show, for instance, she went. I stayed back and rested one night when she and Dave went to the theater; Mary bought a mask which hangs on the wall in their home now.

Although she didn’t brag about it, Mary had an artistic side. She had a great sense of color and used it to paint the inside of their home, sew, do stained glass, pottery and garden.

About 5 years ago, before she was even 60, Mary was diagnosed with multiple myleoma, a tough kind of blood cancer. I remember when she told me she was ill. She was sitting in their back patio; she was still very healthy and well, but she told me she had blood cancer as I arrived for a visit. She and Dave had been at a retreat, as I recall, and she screamed in pain. The cancer had eaten through a part of her back. It would go on to attack her ribs, shoulders, skull and hip. Radiation and chemotherapy beat it back and allowed her to travel, garden and do lots of things she loved doing for several years.

But this fall, she developed congestive heart disease and spent 3 spells in the hospital in the last 3 months. Today, she was getting ready to leave after a 3 day stay. She and Dave were waiting for the doctor to discharge her. She ate lunch and was walking around the ward with a nurse. She was happy to be going home, joking with the nurse and other patients by waving a “royal” cupped hand as she passed by. Then she stopped, said “oh no” and collapsed. She could not be revived and her cardiologist suspects she died from a blood clot to the brain because her collapse was so quick and complete.

Less than a year before she was diagnosed with multiple myleoma, Mary sent me an email titled “Mary’s big adventure.” It was the story of her going to women’s mountain bike camp in the Santa Cruz mountains. She was older than the other students but held her own, returning home banged up but happy. Mary loved bike riding. She was also a dare devil and especially liked riding carnival rides that make you throw up or going fast down a hill on her bike and occasionally wiping out.

Mary and Dave have been family to me most of my adult life. We have watched each other’s children grow up, had lots of adventures; shared some heartache and hard times. I could count on Mary to be proud of my accomplishments, but mainly to love me as I am. She and Dave came to my birthday parties and drove to Oakland the day my family purchased our home. She defined friendship to me.

In my refrigerator are two blocks of tofu. Mary and I discussed a receipe I have for coconut encrusted tofu at our last visit. In an email exchange 5 days ago, right before her last trip to the hospital by ambulance, we made a plan for me to bring my marinated and pressed tofu to her home for us to cook. On my bed is my cookbook with the recipe. In my car are children’s games and puzzles that I packed a few days ago. She’d accepted my offer of their loan for the upcoming visit of her daughter and oldest grandson next week.

It is hard to interrupt this friendship. The plans to make sugar skulls for day of the dead next year, to go to Montana or Arizona; to watch movies about the UK in preparation for my trip; to tour the grounds at Two Acre Wood and comment on what needs pruning, what to replace or add. To try our hands at topiary or to taste test waffle recipes.

Dave called me after work this evening and I was in my car. I came home, talked to him, and then decided to go out to the planetarium. I’d been wanting to see a show there on the Maya and their astronomy and math. I went and also took advantage of Friday night dinner there too. This is exactly the kind of outing Mary would’ve enjoyed.

Mary was angry at being ill, and also overwhelmed by the relentlessness of her ever increasing and changing medical problems. I’m angry at losing her and not getting to be old together. After all these years, I will not have my friend to retire near to. Even so, I am so grateful to have had her as my friend.

Liz Hendrickson