PORTRAIT OF MADELEINE AS A FRIEND
Presented by Luce Nadeau at the memorial of Madeleine Page at Ethical Society Hall, Rittenhouse Square, Philadelphia, on January 10th, 2004.
Written by Luce Nadeau, edited by Angus Johnston
Friends,
Most of us knew Madeleine through one or two of her interests, and even those of us lucky enough to know her for a long time tended to see only certain facets of her life. But, of course, all of us here knew her as a friend. And for this last portrait, Madeleine the friend, I will try to share with you a bit of my Madeleine: the woman I loved, the person I quarrelled with, travelled with and worked with for the last twenty years or so.
Let's start by talking about the Madeleine I worked with. It is fitting to start there, as she was foremost concerned with making a worthwhile contribution to the world. I met Madeleine when she was doing a piece of management consulting for the organisation I was working for. We fought on the second day. The project schedule she had prepared allowed for no flexibility and I had promised my son that we would take a holiday together that summer. I wasn't about to give up. She called me unprofessional. I told her she didn't know what she was talking about. I got my leave, she got her project done, and done on time and well, we became great friends.
Madeleine was a very focussed woman when she worked. She would work at something until it came out right for the people involved. She would probe and scratch and question. I have become a better manager because of her but more importantly I have become a better person. Because that is what she did; help people grow into better humans, *humans*, as she was fond of saying.
We mostly worked in parks, taking walks, drinking wine in cafÇs and eating in restaurants along our way. Most casual observers would not have known that we were working but on a second look, people could not have helped to notice the concentration, the deep involvement in the conversation. She did not go much for flip charts and overhead presentations. Mostly we talked. I raised strategic choices I needed to make for my organisation and she would ask me what my fantasy was for the organisation, what my fears about the future were, how I wanted to feel at this same time next year. She would challenge me and sometimes tell me I was boring her by *playing tapes*. That was her way to get me out of my rut, to stop me from repeating an idea over and over in an effort to sell myself on a solution my instincts didn't like but my head wanted to impose. She could be quite brutal at times. It was effective.
It's funny when I think back on it, how much my relationship with Madeleine involved so much walking in parks and in nature, eating and drinking and laughing and crying. After her father died, she was left with a bit of money and she wanted to do something *worthwhile* with it. We walked the moors of Somerset around where her father lived, it was springtime, we talked about how she could best use her inheritance. Our conversation was interspersed with comments on nature and what we were seeing around us. She explained to me the unusual nesting habits of the cookoo bird on one of these walks. And the beauty of our surroundings that changed day by day as spring flowers emerged, irises succeeding to daffodils, primrose and other hedgerow blooms; it was very healing for her. She always said that there was no spring in Canada where we lived, and *that* May, in Somerset, I understood why she felt that way.
Going back to school at 50 was a very big decision for her, a decision she was irresistibly drawn to but a gut-wrenching one nonetheless. We must have walked 1000 kilometers in the year preceeding her arrival in Philadelphia, while she was figuring out how she was going to make it work.
And we went to Viet Nam together that year. Off we went, two middle-aged women, dressed in wrinkled cottons, weighed down by backpacks full of what we thought of as the necessities of our relatively bourgeois lives, armed with a return ticket, a couple of books, a swiss army knife and 1000 US dollars each. We had a ball. We spent 6 glorious weeks travelling most uncomfortably by bus, train and boat all over the country. We tasted fried larve and drank snake wine. She loved the coffee in Viet Nam. Indeed, I think that's when she started getting *really* interested in coffee. Like two shoolgirls, we had great fun in getting taylor-made silk clothing: pants, dressing gowns, shirts she still wore 8 years later.
And we spent a very memorable afternoon in a Zen Buddhist temple outside Hue, the aptly named temple of the elderly goddess. Tourists arrived at the temple by the dozen in dragon boats, took three pictures and left. We thought ourselves so much more sophisticated. We had rented rickety bycicles to get to several ancient tombsites we wanted to visit so we were not limited by a tourboat's schedule. We stopped at this beautiful temple. The tourist *rush* had just left and we were the only ones there. Paths led us through a bonsaã garden. We later found out from the monk who shared his tea with us that some of the bonsaã were several hundred years old. There was a pavillion in the middle of the garden, it was open on three sides. On its slightly raised platform, in contrast to a beautifully painted simple nature scene in the backdrop, there was a dark table and four chairs. An exquisitely beautiful table with very simple lines, in complete balance, with harmonious proportions, its legs flaring slightly towards the ground. We both stopped in our tracks, Madeleine just touched my hand and we both stood there. It was perfectly beautiful.
To me, that is a true Madeleine moment. A fleeting moment in time where we shared something deep and meaningful and loving and beautiful. Beyond language we connected over such simple things and shared in them with equal joy.
In Dalat, we met a wonderful old Vietnamese gentleman. Very distinguished looking, who ran a restaurant. We went back to his restaurant two days in a row. He was a very learned gentleman who had been a professor of French litterature in a Swiss university and who had not been able to leave Viet Nam at the end of the war when he had gone back to visit his ailing mother. Madeleine spoke beautiful French, in her youth she had been an au-pair in France, learning the language. We engaged in conversation with the elderly gentleman, making a personnal connexion like only Madeleine knows how to do. Right away, finding the essence of the man, his deep pain, respecting it, not speaking about it, just speaking to it. Madeleine had bought a book of peotry written by Vietnamese soldiers, prisoners from both sides of the conflict. The poems were published with an English translation. She asked the gentleman to read some of them for us in Vietnamese. It was truly a magical evening. He, reading in his deep, deliberate voice, the musicality and the rhythm of the language were almost hypnotising. He explained the meaning and the nuances while treating us to copious quantities of snake wine, litterally, there was a large snake coiled at the bottom of the jar, bathing in the amber liquid. Another beautiful Maddy moment. Real, true, moving and a bit weird.
I could go on and on telling about these precious Maddy moments. I have many stored in my heart and I will always treasure them. I am sure each and every one of us here has many of these Maddy moments. We all have an email, a vignette, an experience that is truly unique and significant to us even though the event in itself might be quite ordinary in other ways. In our every day life, Madeleine gave us joy and friendship to treasure.
We have heard today of only a few of the manifestations of Madeleine's friendship. A poem she sent to a grieving friend, a person she made laugh with her wit, someone she inspired to do something good, the spicey foods she shared with many, her soothing words that spoke to our pain, her laughter, her delight in so many things. So many people have said that they are better today for having known Madeleine. Better daughthers, better fathers, better lovers, better friends, better *humans*. She was a very good friend to us all.
Your legacy will live on with us Madeleine. Thank you for your gift of friendship. Goodbye, Lovie.