About Margrit Meyer: In sorting and packing and giving away the various objects that Margrit left behind, I was struck more force- fully than ever by the frailty and by the futility of words when they purport to do justice even to the simple objects which we see and which we touch, let alone the incongruity of words when they presume to define the spirit that is the ultimate essence of our existence. For those of you at this meeting who did not know Margrit very well or who knew her not at all, the bare bio- graphical facts that I can offer you will serve as little more than an unscripted page, a screen onto which you will project your own intuitions and intimations of life, a mir- ror in which you see your own experiences. For those of you who worked with Margrit in the various institutions and for the various causes to which she was devoted, those biographi- cal facts will prove to be a riddle, a veil which more con- ceals than reveals who Margrit really was. Your knowledge of her, will come not from what I can tell you, but from your own inward relationship to her. Margrit Meyer was born on August 26, 1928, in Braun- schweig, Germany in an affordable housing development called "Siegfriedviertel" (Siegfried Quarter) expressive of the architectural and social style of the Weimar Republic. The street address was Siegfriedstrasse 18. *) Her father was a physician who had opened his general practice of medicine only the year before. Her mother had been assistant manager of a local bank who now managed her husband's medical prac- tice. A year after Margrit was born, the family moved into larger quarters at Hildebrandtstrasse 44, renting two apart- ments that were adjacent, one of which served as her father's medical office, the other as the family's living quarters. The advent of National Socialism in 1933 was interpreted by Margrit's parents, erroneously, as it turned out, to be but a passing tempest, as they, ignoring Hitler, moved into a more prestigious apartment at Schleinitz- strasse 1. It was from there that Margrit was enrolled at age 7 in a nearby public school, the Pestalozzi Schule, where she was a diligent student and was much loved by her teachers. It was only in 1938, when her father's license to prac- tice medicine was revoked on account of his Jewish ancestry, ----------- *) I have specified street addresses to make it possible to view readily accessible Internet satellite images. Margrit's house in Virginia may be identified on the Internet maps by its address, 20287 Coolgreen Road, Damascus VA. -2- that Margrit's parents decided to emigrate, but by then it was almost too late. On November 10, 1938, her father was detained in the Buchenwald Concentration Camp being released on the condition that he immediately leave the country. On December 7, 1938, Margrit and the rest of her family bid her father good-bye on the wharf at Bremerhaven as he boarded the ship bound for America. Margrit herself, her mother and her brother followed three months later. On March 31, 1939, they arrived in New York. Because the family was destitute, all their liquid assets having been confiscated by the Nazis, Margrit's par- ents could not afford to establish a home for their chil- dren. Margrit was farmed out to the American family of the Rev. Everett W. MacNair who was an assistant pastor at a Congregational Church in White Plains, N.Y. Margrit and her foster parents quickly became very fond of each other. Their friendship endured for the lifetime of the MacNairs. In the autumn of 1939, Margrit rejoined her parents. Through the offices of the Board of American Missions of the United Lutheran Church in America, her father had obtained a position as a physician in a rural mountainous backwoods community in Southwest Virginia called Konnarock, and it was in that remote and unfamiliar landscape that Margrit absolved her childhood and entered upon adolescence. It is an understatement to say that the local schools which Margrit attended were less than college preparatory. Her first sally into the academic universe was a freshman year at Lenoir-Rhyne College in Hickory, North Carolina. That experience was not entirely satisfactory, and the following year Margrit enrolled at Wilson College in Chambersburg Pennsylvania, an institution of the Presbyterian Church from which Margrit graduated in 1950 with a B.A. degree in Soci- ology. Margrit's first employment was as a waitress in a Cham- bersburg restaurant. She then returned home to Virginia and for a year taught third and fourth grade in the local public school. Thereafter she found a series of very junior posi- tions in church related social work, first in Philadelphia, then in Middle River, Maryland, a suburb of Baltimore, and finally in Hartford Connecticut. In 1953 Margrit enrolled in the Bryn Mawr School of Social Work, from which she received a Master's degree in Social Work in 1955. From 1956 to 1957, she was a social worker in Germany with the Berlin Neighborhood Homes. From 1957 to 1961 she worked as a school social worker employed by the Champaign Illinois Board of Education. From 1961 to 1969 she was a casework supervisor at the Cunningham Children's Home in Urbana, Illinois, a position from which she took time off from 1964 -3- to 1965 for graduate studies in social work at the Univer- sity of Chicago. In 1969 she was appointed Associate Profes- sor of Social Work at Michigan State University in East Lansing, Michigan, a position which she held until 1973 when she became Associate Professor of Social Work at the Univer- sity of Windsor, where she stayed until 1993 when she was sixty-five years old and retired from full-time employment. I am aware of two episodes when Margrit was deeply in love, both of which ended in disappointment. But I never heard from her a complaint that life had treated her badly. She was unquenchably content and optimistic. With advancing age, her optimism only increased. When in recent months I telephoned to make sure that she was well, she would some- times reply: "You should know. Of course I'm alright. I'm always alright." Margrit's optimism expressed itself in political activism. She was certain that the earth should and could be made a better place for all human beings, and Margrit was determined to do her part, and more than her part to make her visions of utopia come true. She was for- ever ready to board a bus to join a demonstration in Wash- ington for a cause she believed in. What seemed to sustain Margrit above all, was her cir- cle of friends, so numerous that I found it impossible to keep track or count of them all. When Margrit was visiting us in Belmont or when we were together in our parents' house in Virginia, Margrit often spent hours on the telephone talking to friends far and near and making arrangements to meet those in the vicinity. Going through her belongings I found so many address books that I lost count. Everyone she met, Margrit regarded as her friend and listed his or her name, address and telephone in one of her catalogues. The doormen at her Detroit apartment house considered Margrit as their friend, and and as for the officials at her bank, Margrit found it natural that she should invite them out to dinner. In one of her compilations I even found the name and address of the Moroccan bus driver who had chauffeured her travel entourage through the Atlas Mountains in Africa. She almost certainly regarded him also as her friend, and it would surprise me if she had not written him a letter of appreciation. Her love of people made her very trusting. She thought nothing of dozing off in an unlocked car in a parking area on the West Virginia Turnpike. She usually travelled alone in her small convertible sports car, and when she was stalled by some mechanical problem, she would trustingly flag the next approaching driver to ask for help. She was courageous beyond belief. -4- For many years she had made her peace with the antici- pation of death. That was the ultimate expression of her courage. She wanted to live and to be independent, but she would unhesitatingly have chosen death over dependency, and when, in an attempt to persuade her to live with us in our house, I described to her the indignities of dying in a nursing home, Margrit replied simply and directly: Then I'll just die. When I contemplate Margrit's life and her death, I begin to understand that she was unflinchingly willing to wager her life in order to live. She habitually took chances, and in the end she won, and what she won was the prize of a life uniquely her own. I also understand that her death, not in a nursing home, not in an intensive care unit, not in a hospice, but in her own apartment, was a dying peculiarly her own, a death that proceeded from the life that was her love, that gave her meaning, and whose pain she accepted in heroic denial.