How can we sum up a life? We have known Emma longer than
anyone here, and we feel a need to convey in some imperfect,
subjective, and abbreviated way the person that she was and the
love we have for her. Each of you saw a different side of Emma, or
knew Emma in the way she touched others, and we shall all preserve
our memories of her, however summarized or silently remembered.
Emma came into the world early on the morning of May 29,
1981, in Princeton, New Jersey. It was her sister's third birthday.
This gave them a special bond and an annual shared chocolate cake.
At 14 months she was fortunate to join the child care group of
Laura Hill, who provided Princeton newspapers with many
picturesque photo opportunities of her five toddlers cruising hand-
in-hand up and down Nassau Street. When Emma was two, we moved
to Urbana, to the house on Pennsylvania Avenue. The house seemed
huge at the time, but we thought the family would grow into it. We
did not know how quickly our children would pass through it.
Emma and Hannah joined the crowd at the Children's Center Day
Care in Urbana. Later Emma proudly recalled that her advanced years
permitted her to skip the room for the youngest children, and move
directly to the Blue Room. In 1986, she began kindergarten at Leal
School. Leal from 1986 to 1989, when we left for a year's
sabbatical, is a jumble of memories of ice cream socials, chili
suppers, poetry shows, and creative learning and teaching. There
were no grades, no tracking. Every child was above average.
Emma's travels began about this time, first with one-day
drives to her grandparents' cottage in Door County, Wisconsin, and
then to her uncle's Mississippi River houseboat in Minnesota. When
she was six, we traveled to France, and introduced the girls to
ancient ruins, elegantly faded chateaux, and a cuisine more
sophisticated than "hot lunch" at Leal. Perhaps Emma's interest in
cooking and food began at this time.
Two years later, we embarked on our round-the-world
adventure: Moscow, Prague, Lisbon, and Canberra. Emma enrolled
in Mr. Harris' second grade class at the Anglo-American School in
Moscow, joined the Embassy Brownie troop, and began to adjust to
living on the 14th floor of an apartment building in a city of 10
million. She never expressed much interest in returning to Russia,
but she had a few pleasures there: stopping at the bread store on the
way home from school for a sweet roll, and buying ice cream from
one of the many street kiosks. Moscow did little to advance Emma's
appreciation for fine food, but when she reached Portugal, she began
a love affair with spaghetti bolognese -- "spag ball" they called it in
Australia,-- that lasted the rest of her life.
Emma was happiest in Australia. We lived in a small
subdivision of Canberra, where everything was within walking
distance: the primary school and the small business strip known as
the "Hughes shops." Finally, Emma could spent her allowance on
something worth buying, and she relished the independence of
stopping by the shops after school. She enjoyed regular outings to
the nature reserve, where she learned how to spot koalas and
kangaroos, but she lost interest in bicycle riding after being
"swooped" by a magpie with an overdeveloped maternal instinct.
Hughes Primary School provided a rigorous education, with regular
homework on word usage that quickly taught her and us that
Australian English and American English were only superficially
similar. "Hot lunch" at Hughes Primary was also different: she
found her beloved "spag ball" as a spaghetti sandwich, which was
also grilled and then was called a "jaffle." Emma made some good
friends in Canberra, and continued to correspond with one of them
until the end.
For their birthdays in 1990, Hannah and Emma became the
proud owners of Finnegan, a Dalmatian puppy, who provided many
amusing stories, received much love, and provided endless
exasperation. Finnegan was a medical disaster on four legs, as close
as we ever wanted to come to the world of surgery and intensive
care.
All this time, as parents do, we were looking for signs of the
adult that Emma would become. She was a bright, sunny, spunky kid.
She loved to please, and she genuinely enjoyed helping out around the
house. She also demonstrated a strong sense of independence, and
she welcomed challenges. When she became eligible to study a band
instrument in school, she chose the French horn, despite its
reputation as a difficult instrument to play. She read voraciously,
although we could never persuade her to read the Jane Austen novel
that inspired us to name her Emma. The journal entries that we have
read after her death tell us of her sensitivity to others, her
knowledge of her own flaws, and her determination to correct them.
We were not surprised, after what we saw in her this year.
We knew less about Emma's relations with her friends. With
adults, she was initially shy, then voluble. As she grew into
adolescence, she became much more reserved, although still she
focused on others' needs, not her own. At a reception at our house a
couple of years ago, she was eager to help, and volunteered to take
coats up to the bedroom. But because she was too shy to ask people
for their coats, she wore a sign, "I take coats". It turned out she
was annoyed when people thought this was funny. But it was. She
had the knack of making us laugh, but she hated to draw attention to
herself. She could not understand why she had been singled out with
the principal's award last May, because, she said, "I haven't done
anything."
At various times, Emma played soccer, softball, and tennis,
and joined the subbie basketball and track teams at Uni. It seemed
she liked sports less for the competition than for companionship and
team spirit, and for this reason, the Uni track team was especially
important to her. She was determined to join the team in some
capacity even during her illness; she sent requests over the internet
for advice on how to combine training and fitness with
chemotherapy, and she persuaded her doctor to allow her to serve as
the team manager for awhile this year until her worsening
symptoms forced her to resign. The reports of the smile on her face
during team meetings overcame whatever reluctance we had about
her exerting herself in this way.
This past year of her illness has been of course the most
terrible terrifying year of our lives. But it also brought out
unforgettable qualities in Emma. When she learned of her brain
tumor, she was worried about two things: participating in Agora
Days--Uni's free-form week of extra classes, because she wanted to
teach a class on "international breakfasts," and her long-planned
class trip to Germany. She conceded eventually that the German
trip should wait two years, but she taught her Agora Days class. Her
next goals were to hold her 14th birthday party and to attend
Hannah's graduation on the next day. She made those, too. Her
summer goal was to be here for the first day of school this past
week. But maybe she knew all along that her presence would be in
spirit and not in body. Perhaps this is why she asked to be buried
with the teddy bear given to her on behalf of the whole freshman
class last September: she had named him "Freshman Bear" and he and
you will be with her always.
She never gave up hope and she never complained. Emma
never once in this past year used the phrase, "It's not fair," even
though this had been a regular part of her vocabulary in ordinary
times. She talked about, "When I get better," and not "If I get
better." And she worried, to her journal and to her nurse, about how
she could help her family and her friends deal better with her
illness. Emma in her life was a giver, not a taker; she thought
little of herself but always about others. Each child is special in his
or her own way. This was Emma's.
Memories are only retrospective, but our memories of Emma include many imaginary memories of what the future might have held for her. Some, like the hope she would find challenges and a sense of belonging at Uni, we have seen fulfilled. For many others, we will never have such a comforting sense of deja vu. Instead, all her contradictory possibilities now coexist in each of us. And if we ask tomorrow, or twenty years from now, "What might Emma have done in this situation?", each response--in all the resulting variety--will help make a future for her, the future she was unable to make for herself, and thus help answer the question, "What might Emma have become?"