Debbie and I were small children together. My first false memory: she fell down some stairs in Cambridge before I was born. I remember my dad and grandfather fixing the stairs going down to our basement in Ann Arbor, Michigan, so this would not happen again. I formed an image of my sister falling and always swore that I remembered it.
When I reached kindergarten age, we walked to Eberwhite Elementary school together with other neighborhood children. She was three years older. We would walk home for lunch and back again for the afternoon, eating tomato soup, spaghettios, tuna or peanut butter and jelly sandwiches—typical fare of the 1960s. She was tall for her age, and I was short, so she seemed quite a bit older than I was. We played together, but often in parallel fashion, with our rival realms of imaginary beings. Hers was a matriarchy presided over by Granny Good Witch. Mine was a kingdom of trolls. Outside, we played “hot potato” and several varieties of tag and “categories” with other kids living nearby. She passed on to me the childhood folklore of our generation: “step on a crack, break your mother’s back,” “eenie meenie miny mo,” and “cross my heart and hope to die, stick a needle in my eye.” Every kid in Michigan ice-skated, so my mom would take us to skate on the pond in the park near our house or at the local rink.
Debbie always took piano lessons. My father had observed her sitting next to the stereo speaker and swaying to the music, at a very early age. By the time we moved to California, she was quite a diligent piano student. She would have been in sixth grade at this point. She had a single-minded focus on music from those years on—something I have observed in my own daughter, from around the same age. Soon, she developed enough facility on the piano to begin organ lessons, having mastered Bach’s two and three part inventions. The organ drew her in. As a teenager she had to convince the bishop to let her have her own keys to the church—the church where we are now meeting to commemorate her life. This demonstrated a certain determination that would become evident later in other aspects of her life. This was a special privilege not automatically conceded to a teenage girl. But she was dead-set on learning to play the organ, and could only do so if she could go to the church to practice every day before school. My mother taught piano lessons, and my father was a fanatical listener of classical music, so Debbie received all the support she needed to pursue music.
She also dabbled with other instruments, too: viola, oboe, and recorders of various sizes, from bass to soprano. As a child of the 70s, she liked Joni Mitchell, Simon and Garfunkel, and Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young. She was a fan of the “Planet of the Apes” movies and Star Trek, as well as midnight showings of “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” at the Varsity Theater. We would watch Saturday Night Live after my parents had gone to sleep, laughing at the antics of John Belushi and Steve Martin.
We were surrounded by extended family: both sets of grandparents were close by, as were our cousins, the Haynes. We would go every Easter to Palo Alto to see my uncle Orval and his family. We did not know how lucky we were to be surrounded by a loving family, nuclear and extended. I had not understood that our move from Michigan to California was coming back home, since I mistakenly believed Michigan to be home.
In her senior year of high school, Debbie began taking the beginning music theory courses in the rigorous music major at UC Davis. This required hours of study, probably as much as all her other courses put together. Many students struggled to pass. For some odd reason, the music major at UCD was geared to composition in the style of Arnold Schoenberg. Playing an instrument was beside the point, though you had to have enough piano skills and theoretical knowledge to transpose (and play) “Bridge Over Troubled Water” in twelve keys. Instead of baby-sitting, as many teen-age girls did, she earned extra money substituting for local church organists.
Debbie was a solid A student at UCD, doing well in every subject and graduating with honors in 1978, when she was barely 21 years old. Ironically, the only B I remember her getting was in a course in musicology. For a course in the English Department, she demonstrated that the “Sirens” chapter of James Joyce’s Ulysses did not actually have the structure of a fugue, as most critics had lazily assumed. She was friends with the other music majors, and, of course, was inseparable from Norbie during her college years. One day, Debbie and Norbie came home with Golden Retrievers from the same litter. We kept the female, Tasha, but the male, Oso (Spanish for bear!) was too large for Norbie’s mother to handle, so they had to give him away. We kept Tasha, but she ended up being more my dog than Debbie’s.
In what should have been her junior year, my father noticed that she had accumulated enough credit hours to graduate with honors in three years. (They wouldn’t let her stay any longer, since she had earned her degree.) She left home to begin a PhD program in Musicology at Stony Brook on Long Island. Her real passion, though, was church music. She got her master’s in this from Westminster Choir College in Princeton, New Jersey, then worked a series of church jobs while raising her two children, Janet and James. She ended up in New Jersey, where she would play church on Sunday and at a synagogue on Saturday. Throughout her adult life she continued to develop her talents: organ, harpsichord, and choir directing, music arrangement and composition, creative writing. Church music jobs are not well paid, generally. Not only that, but these jobs took her away from her own church on Sundays: music in the LDS church is an amateur calling and not a paid profession. It could not have been an easy life.
Debbie moved back into our family home here in Davis after the death of her second husband, Wayne. She was still young and vibrant, and seemed relatively healthy. I thought it would be nice to have her take care of my mother in her old age. Nevertheless, it was Debbie, not mom, who needed caregiving. Her condition was first noticeable as an inability to recall certain nouns, including the names of people. I don’t remember her calling me by my name after 2012 or so. She could not understand, any longer, the movement of the hour and minute hands of a clock. She could still play organ, but experienced difficulty performing all the simultaneous tasks that this required, keeping track of pedals, keyboards, and pulling the stops in and out. The decline was slow at first; she had several relatively good years, where she could ride her bike around town and take tennis lessons.
At one point, she reconnected with Norbie Kumagai, after a chance encounter at the pharmacy. After marrying Norbie, her boyfriend from high school and college, the caregiving responsibilities were split between her husband and her mother. Debbie was losing the ability to read, but she liked watching re-runs of Perry Mason and looking at her social media. To express her ideas, she had to use extra words in order to fill in for the vocabulary that she couldn’t retrieve. Nevertheless, she was still quite verbal, talking fast in order to make herself understood. For several years, even with noticeably diminished capacities, she still played organ and directed hymns in church. Until one day she couldn’t any longer.
I would see her every year at Christmas. Her daughter Janet moved in with her mother and grandmother (Janet number 1) to help with her care. Eventually, the family needed professional assistance, and Blanca was hired to take over most of the day-to-day responsibilities. Blanca was the glue that held the family together, not only taking care of Debbie but cooking for the entire family and cleaning the house, all the while being the matriarch of her own clan.
Every year I saw Debbie in Davis, I knew it could be our final farewell. Against all odds, she persisted well beyond her prognosis—they first told us five to ten years after diagnosis. I attribute this to the quality of care and the presence of so many loved ones. Her mother, her daughter, her husband, and her caregiver kept her alive until her body finally could not sustain itself anymore.
It was a cruel disease, but it did not rob Debbie of her spirit. She expressed her contentment through her beatific smile, long after she had lost the ability to express ideas and feelings through words. She was always responsive to music, and the bluetooth speaker was turned on first thing every morning. All in all, she lived a happy and productive life, born into a loving family and surrounded by her loved ones until the very end.
