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February 18, 1946 - January 6, 2003
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Marie Farrell Billings
Biographical Notes
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Marie Louise Farrell was born February 18, 1946, the first child or Richard and Marie Waters Farrell. She grew up in Brisbane on the San Francisco peninsula until her family moved to a new house in Hillsborough financed by her mother's parents in 1951.
An accountant by education, Marie's father was an officer in the Navy during World War II. Her mother, the pampered daughter of a prominent Bay Area automobile dealer, had not quite completed college when she married at age 20.
Marie arrived within a year following that marriage, and her brother Rick (Richard Jr.) arrived less than a year after that. Another brother, Brian, died in infancy, and three sisters - Christine, Anita, and Toni (Antoinette) followed - the youngest when Marie was 17 and no longer living at home full time.
Marie's mother was not really prepared to be a care-giver rather than a care-receiver when Marie and her siblings arrived, but she did her maternal duty assiduously to the end and somehow managed to be a strikingly attractive woman and gracious hostess in the process. She survived Marie's father by several years and often appeared to be lost without him.
Marie's father bought Waters Equipment Co., Inc., an automobile leasing business, from his father-in-law. Somehow, the obligations he assumed were not fully balanced by the assets he acquired in that transaction, and he stoically devoted the remainder of his life to rectification of that deficit. A heart attack at age 51 left him in ill health until his death at 67.
Marie was a darling blonde-haired child, and her mother treated her almost like a doll until about the age of ten. Then the first of Marie's genetic misfortunes manifested itself and left her feeling abandoned by her formerly doting mother. That misfortune was a hormonal aberration that unbalanced Marie's endocrine system and gave her both superfluous hair and also the severest form of acne.
Marie struggled with the disfiguring effects of acne on her back as well as her face for over 35 years until, mercifully, Acutane provided relief although the scars remained. Because of acne, Marie was a stranger to low necked garments and swimming suits all of her adult life.
A second genetic anomaly that plagued Marie throughout her life caused major problems with her feet. She struggled in constant and enormous pain with hammer toes, tailor's bunions, Morton's neuromas, and the exacerbating effects of botched surgeries intended to alleviate those conditions. And she was unable to wear fashionable shoes.
In comparison with her beautiful mother, Marie came to see herself as the ultimate ugly ducking. With self-esteem thereby impaired, she readily accepted the guilt and shame she perceived was being heaped upon her by parental criticism and Catholic admonition to eschew pride.
Unlike many more fortunate children, Marie took Catholicism very seriously and was haunted by the perception that even the most innocent joy must somehow or another be sinful. She lived almost half a century in dread of judgment and fear of hell.
One further genetic anomaly gave rise to Marie's most awful demon, bi-polar manic depressive psychosis. As early as age 14, Marie realized something was "terribly wrong" and begged to see a psychiatrist. But in those days, mental illness was widely perceived as an embarrassing moral defect, and her plea was summarily rejected.
As time went on, Marie turned to alcohol in a futile effort to self-medicate the chronic discomfort she was experiencing, and she eventually became an alcoholic.
Her perspective became increasingly other-directed and she became her own harshest judge when she found herself unable or unwilling to do what she believed, rightly or wrongly, others expected of her. Her response to such dissonance was three-fold: depression, anger, and rage.
As Marie grew older, her bi-polar affliction and sometimes bizarre mood oscillations impelled behaviors that were displeasing to those around her including both family and friends and, in a judgmental world, she became something of an alienated pariah.
Marie attended four different colleges and finally received a Bachelor's Degree from The San Diego College for Women. Later she earned a Master's Degree in Educational Administration from Pepperdine University. She taught first grade for seven years in the San Diego Unified School District.
Her own view was that she had not been very successful in that undertaking, but she may well have judged herself more harshly than did her colleagues, her pupils, and their parents.
Returning to the Bay Area, she went to work in her father's automobile leasing business, ostensibly as a sales person. It wasn't a very good fit. Honest and compassionate to a fault and perceiving the world in black and white, Marie simply couldn't bring herself to "sell." But she was assiduous in following up and following through with all the administrative details.
In 1981, she struggled for months, ultimately successfully, to locate a car her client wanted to lease. She married him the following year in a grand wedding and reception organized by her parents. On their honeymoon, they traveled to Grand Canyon and the Four Corners country that he discovered as a youth and wanted to share with her. Shortly thereafter, they moved to Capitola were he worked in the then fledgling personal computer industry.
Like many couples, they had silly nicknames for each other, the origins of which were never clear. She was variousl7y "Babe," or "Noing," or "Mus" or "Dear Love." She called him a lot of different things, but when she was feeling especially affectionate, he was "Boopsie."
From 1984 through 1988, they lived in the United Kingdom where her husband worked as a consultant and executive in the computer business. During that time they traveled extensively in Europe. Never comfortable with change, Marie often protested about such junkets while in planning and in progress and then delighted in remembering them afterwards.
Marie was deathly afraid of flying. It took a great deal of courage on her part to fly to England and two years of coaxing and cajoling plus enough Jack Daniels and tranquilizers to stop a rhinoceros (which barely fazed her) to get her on a plane coming home. On this account, most of their travels while in Europe were by boat, train, bus, and - occasionally - car.
During their European sojourn, they saw much of England, Scotland and, of course, Ireland. Their first major holiday trip took them to Greece (Athens and Delphi) and then a cruise of the Mediterranean calling at Rhodes, Lindos, Patmos, Alexandria, Giza and the pyramids, Cairo, Port Said, Ashdod, Haifa, Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Kushadasi, and Ephesus in a whirlwind week.
A two week bus tour took them from London to Antwerp, Berlin (before the wall came down), Warsaw, Minsk, Moscow, Novgorod, St. Petersburg (Leningrad) and the Hermitage, Helsinki, Stockholm, Copenhagen, and Amsterdam (for the Reichsmuseum, Van Gogh museum, and wonderful Indonesian cuisine which Marie had come to relish).
Another bus tour took them to Paris, Lucerne, Liechtenstein, Innsbruck, Venice, Florence (for the Ufizi Gallery), Pompeii (which enthralled Marie for the rest of her life), Rome for a Papal audience and Christmas Vigil Mass at St. Peter's, Pisa, Nice, and Lyon.
On their own, they traveled to Luxembourg, Alsace-Lorraine, Munich for Octoberfest, Nieu-Schwanstein, and took a Rhine river cruise with stops at Heidelberg, Mainz, and Cologne.
A subsequent junket took them to Madrid (for the Prado), Grenada (for the Alhambra on a Christmas day), Algiciras, Gibraltar (for the Barbary Apes), Tangiers, Cordoba, Seville, Ayamonte, and Lisbon.
Their final journey took them to Budapest, Prague (for Christmas), and Vienna (for New Year's eve). An intended trip to what was then Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Macedonia, and Romania was cancelled at the last moment owing to the untimely death of Marie's mother.
Other contemplated cruises to such places as Alaska, the South Seas, and Mexico and the Caribbean via the Panama canal never eventuated, so Marie had not fully exhausted the possibilities of this world at the time of her own untimely death.
Returning to the United States, Marie and her husband lived at first in Mountain View and then moved to Alameda to be closer to the location of Marie's husband's principal consulting client.
One of Marie's life-long hopes was fulfilled when they bought a Victorian era home there with a view to finally having a proper place for some of the antiques and collectables they had acquired, mainly at auctions that Marie loved to attend.
But "stuff" became a major problem. When she married, both she and her husband already had houses full of furniture. They inherited more from both his parents and hers, and they acquired more things that appealed to their mutual tastes.
And neither Marie nor her husband proved to be very good at discarding things. So in the end, they wound up with an entire warehouse full of "stuff" that had been costly to store, never been used, and a real chore to dispose of.
Generally eschewing chairs when she could, Marie was an inveterate "Floor Sitter." She used to love to sit cross legged in the middle of the room reading, doing art, working crossword puzzles, watching television, or indulging her one of her favorite pastimes, "Sorting and Separating" minutiae and triviae which came to be known generically as Titsy-Poo "stuff."
When Marie's mother died, Marie was living in England and, from a distance, disagreed with some of the decisions that were being made by some of her siblings and some of their advisors about the handling of her mother's affairs and estate.
The disagreement ultimately devolved into a suit brought by Marie, and that action alienated many of her uncles, aunts, and cousins as well as all of her siblings. Marie's grandmother even wrote Marie out of her will on that account, the only one of 33 grandchildren to be so omitted. In later years, some of those broken fences were mended, at least partially.
In 1996, Marie was diagnosed with breast cancer. It was a very scary time for all concerned. She had a lumpectomy which disclosed no indications of lymph node involvement, so we went through 49 sessions of radiation therapy but no chemo, and was well into her seventh year of non-recurrence when she died.
By the time she was 50 or so, Marie concluded that she had really been treated unfairly by God, nature, parents, siblings, relatives, Church, courts, and life generally. If she had been delusional about those things, she would clearly have been paranoid, but her sense of rejection, abandonment, and deprivation was not entirely without basis, and she was profoundly depressed.
Beginning in about 1990, Marie began regular psychiatric counseling which seemed of little avail until her doctor began treating her condition with medications as a physiological rather than psychological disorder. That was a major turning point in Marie's life. Conquering alcoholism was another.
Although alcohol was no longer a part of her life, Marie took three other addictions with her to the grave. She was absolutely hooked on caffeine and always took a cup of coffee with her in the car, even if she were only going to the corner grocery.
She was also hooked on nicotine although she did manage to quit smoking cigarettes a number of times, once for several months. When taxes made the price of smokes exorbitant, she began "rolling her own" at a saving of around $3 a pack. The best part, however, was that she began spending more time rolling and less time smoking.
Marie's final addiction was New York Times crossword puzzles. They supplanted an earlier addiction to bridge. She worked them almost every day and, in the end, often licked the ultimate Saturday "mind-bogglers" as well as the easier daily puzzles earlier in the week.
Eventually, Marie spent three years in half-way houses recovering from alcoholism, two years as a resident and one final year as a manager. And she did recover fully. Upon her return to Alameda, she became active as a docent at Alameda Museum, in the Garden Club of St. Joseph Basilica, in its choir, and in other community organizations and theatrical activities along with her husband.
In the last five years of her life, thanks to medications (which she finally accepted she would always have to take), professional counseling, good friends, and determination, Marie finally made peace with herself as she was, and as she was becoming.
Marie loved flowers and pottering around in the garden. In her final summer season, she raised a bumper crop of succulent tomatoes and many other goodies. She also loved squirrels which she called "friends," and was delighted to see many of the nuts she provided for them to bury grow into full blown trees around the yard.
Marie also loved music, both popular and classical. She loved to turn hard rock up loud and dance as if possessed. But she also enjoyed listening to classics and recognized the sounds made by various instruments in symphony orchestras. She was especially fond of, and moved by, Mozart's "Lacrymosa."
And Marie loved her pick-up truck with its stick shift. Driving along in it, she appeared to feel like she was for a moment, queen of the universe.
She resumed her interest in art and music and began studying both seriously. Before she died, Marie produced some paintings that received sufficient acclaim that she finally had to acknowledge to herself that she might just possibly actually have some talent. An enormous step for a person brought up to be self-effacing and unproud.
Marie had no children and eventually concluded it was merciful for all concerned that there were none. However, from earliest years, she loved animals, and in a real sense, they were her children.
As a teacher she kept snakes and hamsters and guinea pigs. She had a favorite dog named Kisha and a rabbit named Rrabbitt II. She accumulated seven abandoned cats (Tom, Bob, Ally, Blue, Pysche, Shadow, and Doodette) and an abandoned Iguana named Iggy, perhaps her all-time favorite.
Although she was sometimes mystified about how everyday things in the real world actually worked, Marie was a very intelligent person. Her I.Q. was over 130, and that fueled some of her discomfiture with her religion and the hypocrisy with which she saw it infused.
But in the end, she came to see that faith, Church, and clergy are not homogenous and that her faith could remain unsullied despite imperfect institutions, flawed traditions, and fallible disciples.
In her final conscious moments, Marie apparently realized she was dying, but she seemed utterly unafraid as if finally at peace. She heard me say, as I had said each day for 20 years, "I love you." Then, despite excruciating pain, she opened her eyes one last time, looked into mine, and said one final "I love you."
Self-deprecating to the end, Marie made her ultimate act of contrition in preparation for receiving the last rites. As she closed her eyes for the very last time, her very last words were simply, "I am so very sorry." And then she lapsed into the coma from which she never again awoke.
Not without reason, some people found Marie difficult to love. Indeed, she may never have truly and fully loved herself, and even at the end she was uncertain that anyone, even those closest to her, really loved her. How wrong she was about that.
Marie was a truly lovely and lovable person, and most of those who knew her best found it quite impossible not to love her.
Marie will be long and sorely missed, and by so very many of those she left behind.
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