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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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