My Aunt Lois

Aunt Lois died the other day, age 102.

She never asked me to write about her, but as I am the Executor of her estate and have the Power of Attorney—an unfortunate legal title that seems to be sullied day-by-day by the highly questionable actions performed by members of its profession, actions that lead all the way up the ladder to our Supreme Court—I feel I have the right to write a few words about her.

 Lois was a remarkable woman, at once a staunch Christian and an exotic world traveler, a believer to the end of her conscious life in the preachments of Mary Baker Eddy, whose book “Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures” was the foundational book in Lois’s life and who founded The Church of Christ Scientist in 1879, to which Lois belonged from the time she turned 18 to the time she died. Her allegiance to Christian Science was a mystery, at least to me, for Lois was a politically progressive, extremely well-educated career woman, a writer and scholar, fluent in French, Spanish, and Portuguese, a somewhat mysterious aunt who held US diplomatic posts in foreign capitals in Europe, South America, and Central America and whose postcards from abroad brought an exciting new world to a boy in suburban Southern California. How could someone so sophisticated, so cosmopolitan, so learned subscribe to a religion in which death did not exist I wondered at the time, and still wonder?

Born in Wheeling, West Virginia in 1920, raised for the most part by a single-parent, her mother Carrie, the grandmother we called ‘Gama’ whose husband Walter died young, buffeted by the Depression, living as a young girl in a dizzying succession of cities and towns—Moundsville WV, Rochester NY, Memphis TN, Thomasville, GA—the women finally came west to Los Angeles. Lois graduated with a degree in Political Science from UCLA in the early 1940s and entered the diplomatic corps, posted for service in the Netherlands and in Belgium. I still remember a small black & white photo she showed me when I was a kid of Rotterdam right after the war—buildings in rubble with the only thing left standing was the metal ribbon of a trolley line running through the middle of the bombed-out city.

Lois lived in the golden age of American ‘greatness’. I can still hear her speaking of FDR’s funeral in D.C., the caissons, the flags, the people on the sidewalks and in the streets, mourning, crying real tears. She was the classic liberal, perhaps the last of the breed, and voted for Obama. I heard her once at the wedding reception of a relative look out at the crowd and say, “smells like a room full of Republicans to me.” Together, we watched the movie ‘Paths of Glory’, Kubrick’s first film, a war movie with an anti-war theme; it was the first time I ever saw Lois cry; the second time was when she called me to say my mother, her sister, had died. Lois was soft in a tough kind of way, and tough softly, never wanting to hurt anyone’s feelings but always saying the thing she thought and felt. Her little house on Dunstun Way in Brentwood was the first place I ever laid eyes on a copy of “The New York Review of Books.” I was a freshman in high school, beginning to dread the times Aunt Lois volunteered to edit my high school essays, always going right to the flaws, pinpointing weaknesses in grammar and logic as if she had a laser.  She’d already written a book, “Mexico and the Spanish Republicans “published by the University of California Press in 1955; she had the perfect right to correct my English. 

In the mid-1960s Lois landed a job at her alma mater UCLA, becoming Director of Humanities for the University of California Extension program. She developed curriculum, led programs, and enjoyed summer sabbaticals to Cambridge, England with Richard, the man she married in 1974. I remember a story Lois told about Richard Neutra the famous architect who insisted on having a pitcher of vodka on the podium whenever he lectured; though she didn’t drink alcohol, abstinence a Christian Science rule, she made no judgment about those who did and made sure the great architect had his vodka.

Lois and Richard lived in a high rise on Wilshire Boulevard in Westwood, then retired in the late 1980s—he from the LA District Attorney’s office, she from UCLA—and moved to Palm Desert for the golf there, the oranges and the grapefruit. They traveled a lot, mostly cruises. She was active in her church and in Blue Shield, the UCLA-based organization that provided scholarships to students in need. She kept in touch with her professional friends, friends she’d made in her professional life in Europe, in Mexico, in Caracas, Venezuela and Los Angeles, Ca.

For the last 10 years or so of her life Lois dwelled in a Christian Science rest home in San Francisco. I’m not sure it’s where she wanted to be—she’d become a true SoCal girl who loved palm trees, loads of sunshine, and making fresh orange and grapefruit juice from the trees in her garden—but her physical circumstances made the choice for her. The kind nurses there took good care of her and a specially appointed Christian Science practitioner prayed for her daily. I’m not sure Lois was conscious of all the prayers, and I’m not sure that she wasn’t—she wasn’t speaking by then.

I sat with her for a long time not long before she died, I did all the speaking. By then she couldn’t say a word. When I did speak Lois would stare at me as if she understood. At one point, a bird landed on the windowsill outside and she looked and looked and looked at the bird for a very long time before it flew away.

 In a real way Lois outlived her obituary. Her eyes were open to the end.

My aunt Lois Smith Bupp with Lea Ann Roddan, Thanksgiving, 2014.