Beauty in My Friend's Death

The sound of Gene's voice carried the news before his words formed it -- our beloved Betsey had died as the new year was coming to life.

Elizabeth Fox-Genovese is how the world knew her, a scholar and intellectual. It was Betsey I knew. Our friendship was a practice in an unfashionable truth -- people need not agree to be steadfast, life-long, dear friends.

I loved Betsey. And Betsey was the hardest friend I ever had. It is in times like this that I find myself quoting Bo Lozoff, "You can do hard."

Betsey and I together planted the seeds of our long and mutually treasured friendship as young women and young wives in the 1960s, each in her own way intent on Figuring Things Out.

She had just arrived in Rochester where Gene -- already eminent as Dr. Eugene D. Genovese -- was chairman (never "chair") of the University's History Department. He and the late greats, Herbert Gutman and Christopher Lasch, and their students, were inventing an entirely new kind of history -- "the new social history" that included everybody.

I had never seen a person actually beam before watching Gene introduce his beautiful young scholarly wife to his Department. And I had never met anyone like her -- elegant, smart, lanky and sophisticated with memorable hair, the consummate hostess welcoming incoming graduate students.

And who was I? The lowest-of-the-low -- the trailing spouse of a graduate student, paying the bills as a medical secretary in spite of my shiny new college diploma. I smile now at the effect this scenario had on me. I decided that Betsey probably needed a friend as much as I did!

And so it was -- she seemed genuinely relieved that I was not "in the business" and I was genuinely interested in her scholarly work on French intellectuals way-back-when. I was also afire with new ideas about women in the world then bubbling up out of the civil rights and anti-war movements of which I'd been a part. Yes, she'd being hearing about that, she said, but she mostly she'd been keeping company with those long-dead French philosophes. Impulsively, I "popped the question" -- was she interested enough to join with me in what was called ever so self-consciously a "consciousness raising group"? She would. She did. We did -- older, younger, working class, academics...having a keen interest, and a mutual delight in the obligatory "dessert" were our only requirements for inclusion. The friendship took root.

Over the years, it was always a surprise when Betsey and I found each other, all the more so when we both ended up in Atlanta. And over the years, she and I came to disagree profoundly about practically every idea that once had brought us together. And still, a larger truth shone brighter. We loved each other for who we were. Kept up with each other through the rough and smooth parts. And it's mostly the very small, very personal things on which I now find myself dwelling in this sad moment.

Betsey and I graced each other's lives. We reached across a number of genuine divides we both fully acknowledged. Why bother? Because we cherished each other and our friendship. In the face of her death, that is where I find the beauty.