When Janet asked me to deliver her eulogy, I hesitated. She asked if I hesitated because it would be too emotionally-charged. It is truly emotionally-charged, but that was not the reason for my hesitation. My concern was that even though I knew Janet better than any other person except Steve, I am inadequate to do justice to her complexity. And in her asking me to be the one who spoke, I knew she was asking me to share fully the Janet I knew.
I recently read a description of Madeline Albright which could have been written for Janet Jerome Wixson – She was irrepressible, wickedly funny, stylish, and always game for fun! Anyone who knew Janet as well as we did knew she was all that and a force with which to be reckoned. Just ask anyone, mostly men, who came up against her in her role as one of the first female executives in technology. Steve’s wonderful video made that aspect of Janet clear. And we all knew her love of naughty limericks and off-color jokes, the joy she felt in shocking the listener with her jokes and stories. Her flair for fashion was a trademark. And boy, was she fun. I could share many stories with you today that highlight those traits, but you have probably heard them, and that is not what she wanted me to talk about today.
My son was once asked by another friend of mine how he would describe Janet, and he replied, “She’s bigger than Life.” That is the most accurate description I’ve ever heard of my best friend. Equally accurate was my son’s description of Steve: “Well… he’s a saint.”
We all knew and cherished the pieces of Janet that she shared with us. Her irrepressible spirit, her disobedient humor, her keen intellect, her vast knowledge of psychology that allowed her to diagnose mental pathologies, her love of color in fabric, art, and flowers, her highly developed palate that encouraged her to both taste and create dishes spiced with myriad herbs, and her determination to share all the beauty and flavors she created with those she loved. What a generous nature she possessed! What a spirit of abundance! Doing something in a small way was not even conceivable to Janet. If she knitted one shawl, she knitted twenty. If she made one Christmas ornament, she made a hundred. One year, she knitted so many pairs of socks that she decided to give them to the homeless to keep their feet warm and her hands occupied. When she and Steve took up biking in their 60s, they had to ride 50-70 miles a day, not ten, and ride across 8 countries not just around their neighborhood, When they took up hiking, they had to hike to the bottom of the Grand Canyon and then hike back out the next day, rather than ride in either direction. It isn’t surprising that when she decided to learn to fly along with Steve, she had to wreck more than once before she gave it up.
In the wonderful video Steve created, you saw a quilt Janet made for me. What you could not see were the countless times my initials, LFG, and BFFs were stitched into the quilt’s pattern. She chose the colors that she saw in me, which were not the colors I wear but probably should. She included a snake in my quilt’s design because she knew snakes signify for me the importance of shedding the old life and old skin to make room for new life to emerge. She made quilts for her grandchildren, AJ and Abbie, no doubt as significant in their designs and colors as mine. Abbie and AJ, each time you look at your quilts, remember the care she took in choosing the colors and design, the hours she spent sewing them, and the love for you she sewed in every stitch. You represented new life for her, Abbie and AJ. She told her friends regularly that you were her future.
In spite of the many pieces of herself she shared with all of us, Janet had some pieces that she did not share, pieces that were deeply scarred from abuse at an early age. She carried those pieces alone, and in later years, let Steve and me and maybe some of you be privy to them. She did not hide those pieces because she was ashamed of them – she hid them because when experiencing those aspects of herself, she was extremely fragile.
Many of us suffered in childhood, and we found ways to deal with the scars of that suffering in order to survive. Janet’s intellect and creativity enabled her to compartmentalize her painful experiences in a way that enabled her to not only survive, but to thrive. When I was just getting to know Janet back in the 80’s at UAB, it intrigued me, and no doubt others. that as she walked around campus, she could be seen carrying on what looked like a conversation with someone else, even when she was alone. She talked as she walked and even engaged her hands in the conversation. She later explained to me that she was having a group meeting and allowing all the aspects of herself to contribute.
You see, Janet had compartmentalized the various aspects of herself to the point that she had created alternate personalities to handle different aspects of her life. You saw her Manager persona in the video, the take charge, get everyone in order Janet. She created a personality she called Shadrack that each of us encountered many times. Shadrack was the persona she turned to in order to be with larger groups of people. He liked to wear flamboyant clothing, enter a room in a theatrical manner, to dance, tell bawdy jokes, and just steal the show in general. I met only once another persona she called Lillie, whose sexual demeanor was a bit of a surprise to me. Steve probably was more familiar with that character. All of us who attended son Mike’s memorial service were greeted by the matronly and motherly Millie, who seemed more intent on taking care of us that in dealing with her own grief. The nurses in the ICU in the Chattanooga hospital where she spent thirty days and nights certainly encountered Fu-Que. Pronounce it for yourself and you can imagine a child thinking it was spelled that way. He was the fighter who protected her from others. Fu-Que almost knocked me out on one of my visits to the ICU when I wouldn’t let him get out of the bed. [Janet drew these two pictures of Shadrack and Lillie and Steve and I think she would want them included.]
I think maybe we all compartmentalize feelings and personalities to some extent. Some who suffer severe childhood trauma compartmentalize to the point that they dissociate from reality in order to not remember that trauma. At an extreme, this compartmentalization s called Dissociative Identity, or Multiple Personality. I refuse to term it a disorder because It is the most useful way that a child can survive certain dramas before she can understand or control unthinkable violations. Janet called it a Multiple Personality Miracle.Those of us who watched the “Many Faces of Eve” developed a perception of a person with multiple personalities, but that level of dissociation is at the extreme end of the dissociative identify spectrum. Janet’s was a more common form. She was aware of her various personas, gave them names, didn’t lose her memory in switching from one to another, and truly utilized group discussions to get input from them all. Her superior intellect allowed her to develop more than ten personas, and those personas enabled Janet to be truly bigger than one person could be, or bigger than life, just as my son described her There is no other way to understand how one person could have been all that Janet was.
Beneath all her personas was a shy, tender little girl who longed for protection and love. A little girl who would curl up in her bed and ask Steve to just stroke her hair repeatedly to give her comfort and peace. And after Steve came to understand Janet’s complexity, being a true saint, he provided that comfort whenever she asked. That little girl’s tenderness was what made Janet such a loving and accepting person, slow to criticize, quick to try to understand others’ bad behavior and assign it to something encountered in their childhood. Perhaps this empathy was facilitated by the interaction she had with the divine during her near-death experience when giving birth to Mike. She spoke of that experience a great deal, almost wistfully, because she had felt peace and acceptance previously unknown to her, and she had no fear of death because of her memory of that experience.
Janet and Steve Wixson were a remarkable couple for many reasons. I love the story of how they met on a double date, he with her older sister Betty, and how Steve determined then that Janet was the one for him. Later, when he found out she had broken up with her boyfriend, he asked her out. She always said she told her family when she got home that she didn’t particularly like Steve but she knew she would marry him. And marry they did – a sixty year bond. They were quite different from one another, but shared so many similar traits. The trait they shared that I have always admired most was their ability to look life’s worst tragedies in the eye, to suffer and grieve, and then to continue to welcome life, to revel in it, to celebrate it with those they loved, and to refuse to be embittered by life’s losses. They found joy in each other, in their two beautiful grandchildren and their loves, in their friends, in their home, in the many interests that they pursued separately and together, and just life in general.
Losing Janet was hard for all of us, but Steve, you lost your life’s partner. Yet even in this loss, you have continued to find ways to create things, like the video of Janet, that bring joy to other’s lives and credit to the woman with whom you shared a lifetime. The way you cared for Janet so tenderly in those last months, the way you remember her in such beautiful ways now, and the way you continue to remain positive as you meet life on its terms are the greatest tribute to Janet I can imagine.
Laura, Abbie and AJ, you are so blessed be the daughter and grandchildren of such a remarkable woman and man. And we are all blessed that they chose us to be their companions in their life’s journey.
Janet Jerome Wixson, you inspired us then and you inspire us now. You are, indeed, bigger than life.
1 thought on “Janet’s Eulogy by Linda Flaherty-Goldsmith”
Comments are closed.
Yes, she was..!! She was my best friend during our junior and senior year at Rogers. We decided to knit socks for our boyfriends during junior year…mine only made it to the heels!! Then our Senior year, we were Band Queen attendants together!!
Janet was a kind and very FUN friend. I have happy memories of her!! We always talked for a long time at reunions!! she is still happy!!