Memories of Linda Sue Mitchell

In memory of

Linda Sue Mitchell

Clarksville, IN

August 28, 1951 - January 6, 2018

Aug 28, 1951 - Jan 6, 2018

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Reiner Goldring

LINDA JAGGERS MITCHELL, AND THE COURAGE TO LOVE – A TRIBUTE

I stood in the front row of a reggae concert at the Kentucky Reggae Festival, and I fantasized Bob Marley was there performing on stage in front of me, and how he would come down and invite me to sing with him before the international audience. But before Marley could utter a word, I caught sight of an attractive, graceful woman, smiling with rosy cheeks and a slender arm outstretched coming toward me, and offering me her hand to shake. “Hello, I’m Linda,” she said.

I had seen her a few times, maybe 10 years before, at a Louisville reggae club when I came to visit from my former home in Covington. Her gracious expression offered me a hint of a vague recollection, but I seized her hand nevertheless, in a cordial way and smiled at her affectionately. A returned smile flashed out from her eager radiant eyes that seemed to say, we have waited a long time to meet again. “Will you dance with me,” she said in a calm, pleasant and confident voice.

She danced with an exquisite passion, her dainty tiny feet stepping with a perfect agility that carried her across the grass floor in running red shoes, and throwing her slender nimble body into a wave of a Caribbean wind that gave the impression that something deep within her spoke to her, and she had no resistance to it but to express its message with her entire body and soul. I noticed how a deep satisfying happiness radiated in her expressive movements, and I saw happy enthusiastic faces turn toward her and crowd around her. I felt myself falling into an unfathomable depth within this person that I rarely would detect in a human being, and in one that made me want to explore.

Later we sat on a hill overlooking the Ohio River, and these chance meetings would prove to be the first of many such personal discussions over personal events and other important issues that troubled us. I quickly learned she was a person absent from any imprint of a stereotype. She rejected any sense of fashion or the latest prevailing trend. I looked at her with admiration for her simple enjoyment of just breathing and living with loving everyone she met. She inspired me and others who met her to address her with a delicate simple and affectionate courtesy. I felt a simple joy in just speaking to her about every day and important matters, and I admired the festive sparkle she lit up with her eyes, answering all my inquiries, not so much the facts I remembered, but with a deep satisfying happiness that I had rarely felt shining out from a human being. And I never heard her whimper once with what I learned about her later, her lifelong serious health challenges that plagued her from childhood.

Everyone who knew her respected her tireless and lifelong efforts fighting for the most vulnerable among us. She organized petitions for children’s health care and universal health care, and all this despite the evil monsters camping inside her and draining her strength and resources. And she did so without the slightest resentment or grief for her own painful campaigns of fighting, always building armies of resistance against the sufferings that landed with waves of diseases beginning when she was very young. One after the other they assailed her, throughout and within her fragile frame, and throughout her painful life, and every time she beat them back with the strength of faith and with the love of friends around her. But everyone knew she didn’t want to be known for her personal struggles.

The courage to love, this defined her more than the indestructible determination to win every fight against the deluge of weakening diseases that was eating her from within, and always threatening to bring her down. Understanding now of her unbreakable spirit, and her intimacy with personal sorrows, I feel guilty for burdening her with my personal troubles, because I knew she would be greatly affected by the grief I held and shared with her, for my best friend, dying of cancer, or other close friend and pets, or confiding in her with my whimpering romantic problems. She would say, “try to weep you will feel better.” And I shed tears before her. And when I brought her my broken spirit, she would heal me like a Sister of Mercy who found me on an abandoned road and took me in, and who always told me, “everything will be alright, we all will come to see this.”

Because she seldom spoke, people stopped to listen to her. She always communicated calmly and politely and with an accurate focus on her words that formed her clear thoughts. She respectfully listened to others and unlike anyone I’ve ever known, not once did I hear a negative word aimed at someone’s character, a trait I admired and wanted to imitate.

She distinguished herself not by her Doctor of Divinity, or her CPA title or her many academic degrees, but for her honesty of character and her strong reasoning mind and her simple devout ways. Once while there for a business meeting, I noticed her eyes take on an expression of deep concern and grief, she stopped reading her papers, she forced a sad smile. She leaped from her chair behind the desk and ran into her room and I could hear her rummaging through her closet. “I’m so sorry she said,” I’m gathering clothes for Henryville, our neighbors’ in next town over. The tornado devastated them, they have nothing left!” She tried to restrain her horror but could not. Do you have any warm clothes you want to donate to them? I told her I had a surplus of warm jackets at home, along with this one I’m wearing. She eyed the coat on my shoulders, and repeated, “They have nothing, and it’s freezing out there.” She had no desire to pursue our meeting further but bore herself with such dignity and deference that I had no choice but to give her my full attention, and strip the warm covering off my shoulders and give it to her for her Henryville neighbors.

And when I felt her fingers lift the garment from my shoulders, she ignited a thought I’ll always remember: This is how she wanted her friends, and the world to know her. This was how a Christian person looked. This was the expression of how we knew that she understood the life of Jesus and Buddha, and all the spiritual leaders she revered.

The principle support of my tender and proud loving friendship for Linda lives in my admiration for her passionate goodwill at the center of her angelic nature, and that lived in the lofty moral world, in a place I could never attain but only strive toward and never reach.

In those last years, she seemed to apportion her life into an uninterrupted schedule of occupations. She always seemed to be planning her next meeting for universal health care activists, time with her grandchildren or solving some mind-boggling unique and vexing problems in higher mathematics, many of whom she shared on Facebook.

So when we met for a business lunch once at her office, when her grandchildren whirled about in the room, swatting at balloons, we would talk over the mayhem and childish laughter, with laughter of our own, and I would giggle at every word she said, not necessarily because it was funny, but because she made my heart happy, and she had no capacity to constrain the joy for life that came out of her.

Sometimes I noticed that her face wore the marks of a loneliness of a secret struggle and concealed a tension that must have burdened her frail body. Despite the lifelong ubiquitous pain that bonded within her body, I heard her say, “This is a journey of love. Love gives this life meaning, I feel a life full of gratitude, we have so much to be thankful for.” Her soul was always reaching higher toward something eternal and something so Absolute that very few people could find her.

My last visit with her at her office, I was surprised to see her with an oxygen band around her mouth and lying down, tied to tubes and breathing machines. “Everything will be alright,” she said in her customary confident way, without the hint of any inner turmoil, or nervous behavior. “Whatever happens will be the grace of God.”
She said this in a voice of gentleness and sincerity, that it shocked me to my core. I interrupted what she was about to say and threw my arms around her, the one and only time I ever wanted to do this with her, and I wept. And Linda wept with me. We wept because we were longtime friends, and because she was kind-hearted, and because our youth had passed together, and because of the unfairness of life, how someone so good, who brought joy into the heart of the world, should lose her precious life to a monster eating inside her heart since childhood, while evil people still go merrily, and because everyone who knew her loved her, and respected her, and would feel her absence in the world without her.

I am proud to know her because she was so intelligent and so good, and I was blessed to have had her heavenly friendship for these past two full decades. And I rejoice that we belonged in the same time, in this world together, and her soul mingled with mine for this brief candle of our lives, and because of that, she made my life more meaningful and sweet.

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