March 27 is my wife’s birthday. Maddy Gold was a remarkable artist and an extraordinary teacher. When I posted my original obituary for her, it was on the funeral home website — the same funeral home down the street from my paternal grandparents’ little row home in East Falls. The same funeral home that had buried both my father’s parents, then my mother and father.
When Maddy’s obit posted, I got a call from the funeral director, a woman I had known since I was a little girl when my grandmother would take me on walks down the street to the local store that had everything from essentials to cheap toys. Joan McIlvaine took over the family funeral home business when she, herself, became a young widow and single mother — a daunting job in the 1960s.
Histories revealed
Joan called me to tell me they had never seen anything like the response to Maddy’s obit. More than 500 people posted their condolences and their stories about her.
It was impressive to get posts from President Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, Sen. John Fetterman and Rep. Malcolm Kenyatta due to my work as a journalist covering politics for national and local publications. There were deeply personal posts from some members of my family and Maddy’s family as well as friends of ours. And there were entries from some of the 160,000 Twitter/X followers with whom I was close.
But it was Maddy’s former students who provided the volume of postings. These posts told a decades-long story as well as stoking my deep grief as I read them.
Maddy had begun teaching night school at the University of the Arts while still a graduate student at the prestigious Pratt Institute in New York. After grad school, she became an art and literature teacher at St. Joseph’s Catholic High School in Hammonton, New Jersey, where she taught for 17 years while also teaching nights at UArts.
Maddy had regaled me and our friends with stories of her days at St. Joe’s for years.
A wildly funny and incredibly smart woman who was also an extraordinary teacher, Maddy had — to read these former students’ words — changed their lives. At this straight, highly regimented and socially cloistered high school, Maddy — a then-closeted lesbian and open Bohemian who dressed in outre clothes and jewelry — was a world apart. She had her students reading provocative work like “Perfume” and “Lolita” and challenged both their views on literature as well as their perspective on the Church and on politics.
Maddy was called before the bishop several times and yet St. Joe’s never fired her. She was adored by her students and quietly supported by some of the nuns who admired both her teaching skills and her willingness to stand up to the Church hierarchy to defend herself and her students.
Other posts on the McIlvaine website were from more recent students — Maddy had been a design professor at Drexel until just six months before her sudden death during treatment for an aggressive stage-four cancer. She had seen emotionally riven students through the pandemic where some felt trapped with unsupportive families. She was a sounding board and shoulder to literally cry on for freshmen students who revealed to her everything from sexual assaults to abortions to coming out as queer or trans.
Maddy was not just a fabulous teacher remembered for that skillset, she was a safe space for the most vulnerable in her many classrooms.
It was these posts from former students, not those from our families and friends, that told a major story and wrote a crucial chapter of Maddy’s personal history.
Grief is a story
Mary Oliver was a renowned poet. She won all the most prestigious awards, including the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. She died in 2019 at 83.
Oliver was partnered with artist and photographer Molly Malone Cook, who was also Oliver’s literary agent, for more than 40 years. They lived together in Provincetown, Mass.
Provincetown is known as a gay mecca and was a place about which Oliver wrote often and which Cook frequently photographed.
The couple first met in Switzerland at the home of American poet Edna St. Vincent Millay in the 1950s. Of that meeting, Oliver later wrote, “I took one look and fell, hook and tumble.”
Oliver dedicated many books to Cook over the years. In her 1992 acceptance speech for the National Book Award, Oliver publicly thanked her partner, saying, “Molly Malone Cook is the best reader anyone could have. She is the light of my life.”
When Cook, 10 years Oliver’s senior, died suddenly in 2005 at age 80, Oliver’s grief was overwhelming. She created a big beautiful book, “Our World,” a compilation of photographs and journal entries of Cook’s and memories, prose and poetry by Oliver.
Hiding grief is erasure
It was in part through Oliver that I learned grief is a life chapter we have to write. We are grief-resistant in America. Unlike other countries and cultures where grief is often very public, in the U.S., people are expected to “move on” quickly.
Often, grieving people are told that their loved one would want them to move on. Or to party in their name. How many balloon releases have we witnessed where gutted families are pressured into saying just this when a loved one is killed suddenly in gun or domestic violence or the victim of a hit and run?
When I have written about my own grief as a widow on Twitter/X, posting stories about Maddy and me, the responses have come in the hundreds. Other widows, mothers whose children have died, family members who have lost someone to cancer — all want to share their grief story with someone who gets it.
And sharing that grief means being allowed to tell the stories of our loved ones lives and deaths. Taking a page from Oliver, I presented Maddy’s art and the story of our decades together for a national publication.
I hope to have a showing of her work in Philadelphia next year.
Erasure
For several years, I have been working on a new book on lesbian erasure. In that book, I detail how academia and histories have erased the lesbianism of pivotal female historical figures like Jane Addams, founder of modern social work; noted feminist and abolitionist Susan B. Anthony; and Emily Blackwell, one of the first women to graduate from medical school in the U.S. who was a feminist and activist. Blackwell lived with her partner, prominent obstetrician Elizabeth Cushier, and Blackwell’s adopted daughter Naomi in Mt.Clair, New Jersey for 25 years.
This erasure under the guise of academic accuracy is actually revisionist history that limits female agency and elides female sexuality.
That it is effectuated largely by women academics is acutely disturbing.
They are not alone.
Donald Trump began his attempts at trying to erase us on day one of his presidency. Trump’s assault on LGBTQ+ people began with him stripping all data on and information related to LGBTQ+ people from all government websites.
He nominated Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as director of Health and Human Services. Kennedy holds a series of false and problematic theories on LGBTQ+ people and also asserts the cause of HIV is a debunked theory from the ’80s.
Trump then signed an executive order declaring there are only two genders, male and female, erasing trans, nonbinary and intersex people.
But Trump didn’t stop there. He also signed executive orders banning all trans women and girls from playing sports on teams that did not match their gender assigned at birth. He also banned gender-affirming care for minors. Trump has since tried to banned trans people from the military.
Playing politics with the stories of our personal lives and the history of our community has now been expanded by Trump to playing politics with our very lives.