TEN THOUSAND PRESENTS

Betsy was a survivor. She survived the common saga of our age and she mirrored so much of what happened to our generation. We often felt that we represented our enormous cohort passing through our time in history so well that we joked the newspapers must have a permanent tap on our phones and lives. We would experience, or even think, something new in our careening life journey and any time from six days to six months later a feature story would appear on this experience or trend in the New York Times or Wall Street Journal. We weren't always the very first of the "early adopters" to try something new, Betsy was basically too conservative to do that. But we were both so eager for new ideas and experiences that we were usually amongst the first of our peers to get into new ways of being, acting, and experiencing our world. And once we did anything, it was guaranteed to take off across our entire generation as the latest thing. We even half seriously considered starting a business called "Firger Sociometrics" and let social scientists, journalists and marketers follow us around to predict what would happen to the rest of our age group in the coming months and years. A whole branch of advertising has in fact since grown out of this concept that is now called "reality- based anthropological market research." Of course the ironic twist is that the ultimate experience of our life together, Betsy's illness and death, was without a doubt 100% predictive of the fate, in one form or another, of all of our peers.

Betsy had experienced childhood neglect from a depressed mentally ill mother. She also suffered emotional abandonment from a workaholic father, who survived but was forever marked by the Great Depression. Her parents later divorced after 43 years of awaiting the impending "Damocles sword" of a fragmented family from her earliest childhood. This was made the more frightening by the prospect of being left with a mentally ill mother, if her father ever abandoned them.

She found herself in a workaholic trap of a job, which then precipitously let go in a "downsizing" shortly after the loss of my own job in a corporate merger. She suffered emotional abuse and abandonment by therapists. There were also "mirrors" of Betsy's childhood in the working through of my own issues of emotional abuse from my youth. Ultimately she went through her own depression, unworthiness issues, and death wishes expressed as her urgent need to just "get off this merry-go-round." Finally, her "depressed immunities" were the seeming physical confluence of her father's sense of an imminent Depression in the outside world meeting her mother's real depression in the interior landscape. This concluded with her father's death from cancer during the drama of the "100 year hurricane" Andrew in Florida. Her mother died some years later, after Betsy's lifetime of caring for and catering to her emotional and mental illness. Betsy said that when she was born, the "umbilical cord went the wrong way," with life sustenance running out from her to her mother.

Betsy ultimately confronted her own mortality with a diagnosis of cancer and survived for five and a half years, which was twice the time and odds expected for her prognosis. Together we endured and triumphed through repeated close calls, hospitalizations and more than 100 blood transfusions. Betsy and I together experienced many of the social upheavals that our cross-section of society had to face in the late twentieth century .What was remarkable was that we met all of these challenges directly while many of our friends, for the most part, experienced few and on rare occasion none of them. One could say that Betsy lived fifty chronological years but several full lifetimes of experience, compared with "unaffected" friends like some of her colleagues and former college friends. Betsy on the other hand felt a close kinship with and sought out other sufferers who were often complete strangers. Much like the story of the Velveteen Rabbit we had been worn down until we were "real."