Lady Business: Sunflowers, resilience, and August blues

Hello and welcome to Lady Business, a weekly newsletter about women, the business world, and all the ways they overlap. You can sign up for Lady Business and read previous issues here. This is the seventy-eighth issue, published August 15, 2019. 
 

Life Lessons

(Sister Nancy's favorite flowers.)

 

August is a weird time of year for me, I wrote last week. For professional reasons, but also personal ones: There’s a birthday, and a looming five-year anniversary of the death of my grandmother. (Bernice, an early computer programmer who worked until her 70s and traveled the world for decades after that, is kind of the spiritual godmother of this newsletter.) And then there was this past week, which has been melancholy and reflective for other reasons.
 
In June 1996, a young woman named Aimee Willard was murdered on the side of a highway near my high school. She was also a graduate of my high school -- a close-knit, all-girls community run by an order of Catholic nuns -- and the niece of one of those nuns, a beloved senior teacher there. So Aimee’s horrific death, a few months before I started my freshman year, inevitably shaped my high school experience, in obvious ways and more subtle ones.
 
There were prayer services, and a memorial scholarship named for the star athlete Aimee had been, and safety assemblies about how young women driving alone at night should react when pulled over by the police. (Aimee’s murderer, we were told, had stopped her car by pretending to be a cop. To this day, I can’t see flashing lights in my rearview mirror at night without recalling those warnings.)
 
And there was Sister Nancy Bonshock, Aimee’s aunt, who would become one of the most important teachers I had in high school. A trained anthropologist who became a nun at 18, Sister Nancy taught the most advanced history and government classes at my high school, the ones that helped shape how I think as much as the international politics degree I would later pursue. She did so while demanding excellence, humor, and compassion from her students, and while creating a warm community around her. Today I remember her classes as much for the lasting friendships I formed there, including with two of my closest friends today, as for what I learned.
 
And she did it all while gracefully gritting through a murder trial and a dire diagnosis of inflammatory breast cancer. All in the same year or two. I knew at the time what she was going through -- the trial of Aimee’s murderer was making headlines, and Sister Nancy had to cut back on her teaching once she started chemo -- but it was all so matter-of-fact. This is happening, so I’m going to deal with it.
 
It’s something I couldn’t fully appreciate until I started thinking about it in retrospect, as an adult who is stunned and impressed by everything that this woman took in stride. Not without mourning, not without pain, but with courage and strength.
 
Sister Nancy died last week, at age 72. And as I’ve been mourning with my fellow classmates and preparing to go to the funeral later today, I’ve been impressed all over again by realizing just how much she lived through, without allowing it to stop her. As I wrote over the weekend:
 

She taught me and so many other young women how to meet life with courage, curiosity, kindness, and tremendous strength and resilience in the face of adversity: When she started chemo, and her energy flagged and her hair fell out and yet she still showed up for early morning sessions to make up missed classes with her students; when her niece was brutally murdered, and the case went cold for years before Aimee’s killer was finally caught, and she spent years reliving the crime as she and her sister and the rest of Aimee’s family helped see the case through the justice system; when she retired, yet still remained deeply interested in and supportive of the lives of the women she taught to think critically about the Supreme Court and the French Revolution and the Great Leap Forward.
 
I’ve also always remembered her sharing examples of the best bad writing, giving me an early warning against the laziness and vague stuff I’ve tried my best to avoid in my career as a writer. Stuff like: “Up until the 1950s, the American people were just going through life.” Yet: Hermana Bonshock, up until this week, all of your students were just going through life, taking your presence in it for granted. We will miss you.
 

Lady Bits:

 
--Between the life events, the work deadlines, and the increasing pileup of out-of-office messages, I think I’m letting August win the rest of the month! Lady Business will return after Labor Day.
 
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