Picking Apart Obituaries: A Life as Resume

Back from  the Balboa Theatre, where I saw 20 Feet from Stardom, which the marquee made look like something longer:  "Frances Ha Wolverine 20 Feet from Stardom Popcorn Palace Every Sat."  And after reading Tennessee Williams' short story (not play) "The Night of the Iguana" and wondering how such a frank and sexual story got published in 1948, I turn my attention back to Mom's obituary because I'd always felt bad about the short mention of her parents, particularly my saying that they were her adoptive parents as if that just weren't good enough.  But that was not at all what I meant.  I had to mention that they were adoptive parents so that I  could also mention the siblings she found--or rather we, Dana and I, found--when Mother was in her sixties.  I reach a state of apoplexy when I hear someone refer to their birth mother as their "real" mother, so I felt bad that people might get the impression that I didn't consider grandparents not blood-related as "real.".

In loving memory of Nadine Martin, Mom, Nani, Nay, of Pleasant Hill, born  in Kansas City, Missouri  on October 25, 1921, named Natalie Virginia Stephens and renamed Nadine Virginia Robison by her adoptive parents Perry and Lela Robison, who moved to Oklahoma and then to California, where she attended school and studied piano and ballet.

                An honor student, she started UCLA at the age of sixteen, also attended UC  Berkeley, and later left college to marry Elmore Martin, type his dissertation, and start a family.  They lived in California, Idaho, Iowa, South Carolina, and Kansas.    In South Carolina, she continued her education through correspondence courses at the University of South Carolina, and the year they lived in Hays, Kansas, she graduated with honors from Fort Hays Kansas State College with a degree in English.  She and her family then moved to Pleasant Hill, California, where after twenty-five years of marriage and five children, she and her husband divorced.   

                 She worked as a counselor at the Children’s Shelter in Contra Costa County, where she met Kathy Loss, who became her partner and companion of more than forty years.  She also worked as a Probation Office for Alameda County, where she was  praised  for her beautifully written court reports.

                She and Kathy travelled together to Canada, Europe, Scandinavia, and Russia, bicycled across the Netherlands, visited her daughter Tina in Algeria, took cruises to Mexico and Hawaii, and went camping across the northern part of the United States to find the perfect apple pie.  A francophile, her favorite trip abroad was probably one to see an Impressionist exhibit in Paris.  She also made trips to see her daughters Dana and M’Lissa and their children and to visit her daughter Susan and son-in-law in Texas.  

                In her sixties, she discovered that her birth mother had five other children, four of whom she then met for the first time.  

I reach a state of apoplexy when I hear someone refer to their birth mother as their "real" mother, so I felt bad that people might get the impression that I didn't consider grandparents not blood-related as "real."

That's one of the reasons I feel good about looking into the Y in Paris-World War I history of Granddaddy Robison.    

 Resumes, even when totally factual, distort and mislead.  That is, after all, what they are for!  Tomorrow I plan to talk about Mom's names.