Memories of Carol from Johanna Zeh

I met Carol in 1962--we were college roommates at Barnard in NYC, for a year.

We re-connected, briefly, in the fall of 2007, by e-mails, thanks to the internet, and caught up a little, on 25-30 years of missing news. One of the first things she immediately told me of was that she had advanced metastatic breast cancer, but she intended to work "until the last nail was put in her coffin." Why--because she loved her work. And couldn't imagine doing anything else, of travelling the world to talk about sex!

I offered--or tried to offer--to help, and she refused. Perhaps Carol had some sense of how short her remaining time was. She was absolutely determined to get together with Aaron and Ryan over Christmas, "even if she had to get on the plane in a wheelchair." So now I hope those days together at the resort did happen, and she heard of Aaron's kids's achievments, and Ryan's life in Amsterdam, and she had one precious last long time to spend with them all.

I have memories of long phone calls with Carol, when she was pregnant with Aaron, and too fat to reach her shoes, or of meeting her Travis while driving across the country to get to my dad's dying time. Of hearing of her first grant to go to Belize, and of days before that--when we swapped our enthusiasms from our college classes. If any of you know Carol, you can imagine her sitting on top of a pile of clean laundry, looking up from a physical anthropology text, passionately describing the evolution of the turtle's anatomy. That's a memory, that may bring your own to mind--of how she shared her intellect, her beliefs, her interests.

If anyone can forward my name and 3e-mail to Ryan and Aaron, I can tell them a little about meeting Carol's mom and dad in Atlantic City, about our times together in NYC, about her job at U of Penn studying fighting fish. I know how much she cared for and relied on Travis being there. This is the man who, she wonderingly showed me, loved her and bought her a new refrigerator! Music connected Carol to Travis, and the other way around. Piano, guitar, folk songs, jazz, and perhaps even her dad's own band leader days gave her in music what she shared with her husband, and probably what she conveyed to her sons. "Quite talented!" as she smugly put it, describing Ryan's bass playing, in Amsterdam. "A marine biologist, does very well, married and kids! " describing Aaron. If Carol so very succinctly said it, you know she felt it a thousand times more proudly, telling a long-ago roommate of her two grown sons. And missing Travis? Of that, a couple of sentences conveyed her total loss...

Once, maybe what, 15? 20? years ago, watching TV, I recognized Carol on a National Geographic special. That chin, those long earrings, that leaning forward, with a baby in her arms, giving rapid fire explanations to the camera, of the medical and anthropological facts on world-wide television. So I knew to be proud I'd known Carol, and I learned she'd done what she always wanted to do at age 17 and 18: be an anthropologist, keep her music alive, counter racism and rampant political misconceptions about human beings, with science and fact and intellect and passion.

It would have been really, really, really nice, to have had a few more years of Carol! ...to become "old ladies" together, e-mailing and mumbling about long-ago funny tales, sad tales, unusual events and people we'd known. If anyone can forward my name and e-mail to Ryan or Aaron, I've saved Carol's "letters" from this past fall, and can send them on, in hopes that maybe they'd like to hear her words. Or if I can tell them about her life before they were born, perhaps that would send them some sympathy and best thoughts. Offered to help Carol, so the offer extends now to her two sons, if there's something practical I can do.

Finally, I know Carol wanted Alternate Visions to continue. Her work, her family, her life--which of us has not had our lives changed, from knowing her?? I'm a little voice from long ago in Carol's intital times--to see the photos and read of her co-workers, her friends, the places in the world she made home, those are the large voices, that will carry on what Carol started--making the world a better place to live in.

Sincerely,

Johanna Zeh
Boulder, CO
USA