1974 - Graduation, Humble (Barely Habitable) Abodes; Start of Their Healing Journey; Her Sweetheart’s Mom & Linda’s Love
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Linda graduated, but due to some academic snafus did not get her degree in Archaeology, completing her studies in Classical Civilizations instead. Her coed dormmates drove to Ocracoke Island. With their collected boyfriends and beaus, they reveled in the wilderness and with each other, the last wild barrier island on the North Carolina Outer Banks for a last wild celebration marking the end of that phase of their lives.
Half of them moved to 15th St. in Charlottesville for the summer, friendships deepening. But come Autumn, people went their various ways and Linda moved into a respectable apartment with a respectable roommate who wasn’t her lover. Her parents gave her a 412 Volkswagen sedan for graduation to “keep you away from him”. Hoping to start a homestead and get back to the land she hocked it, using it as collateral to buy with Paul 10 acres of undeveloped white oak forest south of Charlottesville.
Their life before them, love sustained them. Despite the unconventionality and defiance of common standards considered appropriate for rebellious young’uns in those days, they decided to marry.
As Linda was by then intimately familiar with the UVA hospital, to match schedules with Paul she became an attendant in the NICU and the pediatric ward, then Labor and Delivery. All kindled her innate nurturing spirit, and fired her to start thinking of becoming a midwife. Paul for easier work and more pay, but also with interest building about a career in medicine (something he never anticipated or desired), became a Respiratory Technician
An incredible sweet soul with a self-sacrificing heart for her children and others, Paul’s mother (“Mom”) became completely disabled with several types of inflammatory arthritis, profound emotional illness, and then alcohol. Her maladies began in 1952 with postpartum depression after her fourth child. Becoming an eighth-grade math schoolteacher in a rough demographic situation in which knife fights occurred in her classroom hastened her unraveling. But she did attempt to mother in whatever way she could, and found reason to hang on from being part of her children’s and then her grandchildren’s lives.
At Linda’s suggestion, they took Mom out west and into the wild.
Up Hell’s Backbone, over to Escalante on what was a 4-Wheel Drive trail in those days, to Bryce Canyon. Enroute, a grizzled but impeccably dressed highway worker in his 70’s doffed his cowboy hat to Mom. Commenting on their “rig” he grinned and asked Mom if she would join him for dinner. Standing next to their Jeep on the roadside, yet! Never would she have done such a thing, but she blushed crimson like a schoolgirl. They had another 60 miles to go, but Mom glowed for days.
After Linda and Paul had been together and so obviously in love for several years, Mom told her son that although Linda would never say it, they should get married. It took him another year or two and some other profound experiences to fully reach the wonderful solidity of that conviction, but Mom stayed steady in her certainty and it helped.
CAUTIONARY ADVISEMENT: This website intends to celebrate Linda’s life, to memorialize her accomplishments and her most elevated self. The Eulogy, the Timeline, and the Themes pages attempt to do that in the best way possible. Additional detail and personal reflections can enrich appreciation of what Linda accomplished yet may feel irrelevant or even controversial to others. To keep the primary focus on what matters most, additional detail is reserved for these Read More pages linked from the Timeline.
Please respect these additional subjective and in-depth accounts as intended to illustrate deeper and perhaps the most admirable aspects of Linda’s humanity, and as part of her partner’s bereavement and healing process. Sections with especially subjective first-person and personal recollections are identified with a note saying: Her Partner’s Personal Perspectives.