a blog by Elisabeth Young-Bruehl

Dear Relatives and Friends, Ladies and Gentleman,

My step-father Ernst Sutton has honored me by requesting that I eulogize his wife Lois Sutton, who departed our family, our community, and our world on the 7^th of October in this year 2011.

We who are gathered here at her last home, Jenner’s Pond, each knew her differently: as her husband, her children and step-children, her grandchildren, and –in absentia—her two little greatgrandchildren, and as her friends of diverse vintages. We each knew her partially, through a part or parts of the eighty-nine years of her life. So I think –and Ernest Sutton agrees—that the appropriate way to speak well –to eulogize—her is to draw a biographical portrait which each of you may contemplate differently, from your different knowledges of her,  but all recognize in it the same person.  Coming together in recognition of a person is a pleasure, and a pleasure of the sort in which Bea Sutton excelled –a pleasure of hospitality.  We wish to provide an opportunity for reflection on her whole life and on her convictions about how a life can and should be lived well and death, inevitable and inexorable, faced with courage and forbearance.

Bea  Sutton declared many times during her life that she did not know what becomes of a human being’s soul when it departs life and this world, but that she believed that there is a Divinity who receives and welcomes that soul—and all souls. To this Divinity, she believed, belongs judgment upon how a soul chose to be while in a mortal body and on the planet earth, which that Divinity looks upon as a loving parent looks upon children and their shared habitat.  We—and all those who have lived and who still live—are the family of that Divinity, she believed, who judges how each child lived, but does not pronounce upon whether any soul should be assigned to a Heaven or a Hell. She did not believe that the loving parent Divinity was a punisher or a disciplinarian, even of prodigals. The Divinity in whom she believed was always compassionate and forgiving. She was an admirer of St. Francis of Assisi, who aspired to be compassionate and forgiving like his Divinity.

As each of you knew, each in your own way, Bea Sutton was generous in every way, but especially in her acceptance of people in their individualities and in their diversities.  Even her critical judgments upon people who were not accepting was, nonetheless, accepting.  She did not reject other people’s religious or political beliefs when they differed from her own, although she felt sorry for them when they isolated themselves from others with rigid and fundamentalist beliefs or with political ideas that cut them off from caring for the family of humankind.  I remember vividly when she made me a gift for my sixteenth birthday of the book of Edward Steichen  photographs that is entitled The Family of Man (1956) and joked with me: “Being a good member of a single family is very difficult, being a good member of the human family verges on the impossible, but you must try.” Politically, she began her citizen life as a liberal Republican and converted to voting as a Democrat in the 1960s; she was always a Christian, but she became progressively less church- or denomination-identified and more  –as it were—freelance.

She had grown up in an Eastern Shore family, on a large dairy farm in Cecil County named Brantwood, which had been in her father’s family for many generations.  He had been born in the grand wooden bed in which she was conceived and in which her mother gave birth to her and her older brother Wallace, known as Spike, a farmer, and her younger sister Corinne, known as Bunny, an artist, most of whose children are here today, along with Spike’s widow Barbara.

Bea’s parents, Wallace Williams and Elisabeth Bulkley Smith Williams had met on New Year’s Eve, 1917 at an officer’s ball held in the  palace of the royal family of Luxembourg , in the last winter of the Frist World War.  Wallace, a captain (later a colonel) in the American cavalry, and Elisabeth, who had gone to Europe as a member of a YMCA troop-entertainment orchestra, both came from large families.  Elisabeth’s was from Brooklyn, New York when Brooklyn was still a separate city, for which her great-grandfather Cyrus Porter Smith, the guiding force behind the establishment of the Brooklyn public school system, had been the first elected mayor, starting in 1840.  The Smiths had a family mansion on Pierpont Avenue that housed many generations of them. Beautiful, a gifted violinist, gracious  and refined, Elisabeth had joined the YMCA orchestra in order to carry out a mission she had resolved upon: to locate and mark the unmarked grave of her childhood friend and beloved fiancé, Norman Du Bois, who had been killed in France.  When Wallace later proposed to Elisabeth and asked her to join him at Brantwood, he was asking her to make a profound change in her life, away from her urban and urbane family whose  Anglican ancestors, prosperous merchants, were descendants  of  two Mayflower  families –the Hookers and the Bulkleys—and into the midst of Scotish Presbyterian  farmers whose ancestors emigrated to Maryland in 1700 and worked their lands with their slaves until the Civil War.  Wallace, one of nine children, had never finished school, even though his own father was an exception in his generation –a highly literate pastor with a theological degree from Princeton who became a editor of the Cecil Whig newspaper in his later years. Bea always called her father Wallace and his brothers, her uncles, “the gems –the rough gems.”

Bea Williams was born on August 30, 1922, the middle of the three Williams children.  She was surrounded as a child by women whom she deeply loved and admired. Her mother Elisabeth; her father’s mother, Mary Williams, who was known to her entire extended clan as Mother Mary Williams; and Theresa Davis, the live-in African-American housekeeper and cook, whose slave grandparents had been freed by the Williams family. Bea always said that she had learned to be an artful homemaker and a loving mother from these three women.  With deep sympathy, she would speak about how own mother, Elisabeth, had gained a mother in Mother Mary Williams, who had solaced for the great sorrow of her life, which was that she had lost her own mother, Bea’s grandmother,  when she was a child. Emily Lawrence Clapp Smith, an accomplished pianist, had suffered from what her husband called “nervous spells,” and had been eventually  committed to a sanatorium near Cornwall in the Hudson River Valley. Her children never saw her again, and Elisabeth never knew her mother’s fate, or when she had died. She vanished.

Bea Williams viewed the decision of her mother’s  father  William Bulkley Smith, not to speak of the lost Emily, his wife,  as a tragic error, an abandonment of their four children, who, in effect, lost their mother twice.  She resolved, as she grew up, to try to confront  illness and mental illness squarely and not to be secretive or stigmatizing, and she extended her resolution to anything that deserved the title “trouble.”  It is this resolution, I think, that made all who knew her sense that she was a person to whom they could confide their troubles, which she would hear acceptingly, generously–and help if she could.

Bea was educated in the Elkton, Maryland schools and then sent to the Friends School in Baltimore for her last years of high school. Her father Wallace was often in Baltimore because he, a stalwart of the Cecil County Republican Party, was a state senator and then involved in local politics in various positions. Bea then did two years of junior college at  Strattford College in Danville, Virginia, at the beginning of the Second World War. When she returned to Brantwood, she worked in a kindergarten that had been set up for the children of men and women who were entering into the American war effort that commenced after Pearl Harbor, in 1941.  She also met  the handsome football coach at her sister Bunny’s school, a  man from an old Williamsburg, Virginia family, a star athlete at Washington College, a 1936 Olympian in track and field, named  Herbert Gibbons Young,  who soon after  enrolled in the Marine Corps and began military training. They married in 1942, just before he left with his unit for the South Pacific.  Later, she moved to San Diego, the Marine Corps’ Pacific Coast base camp, and it was there that she gave birth to their first child, Herbert Gibbons Young, Jr. in November, 1944. I was conceived in San Diego, and born in March, 1946, after they had driven home across the country, back  to Brantwood .

While raising her two small children, Bea Young also took on the responsibility of helping her husband return to their familiar world after two years of service in one of the War’s most horrific theatres, where the land, sea and air engagements with the Axis took the lives of every Marine in his unit except himself. He could not speak of this.  His, of course, was not a  generation of soldier survivors to whom counseling for post-Traumatic Stress Disorder was offered or even thought of –the condition was not even named until 1981.  Bea helped him, and he helped himself with the activities for which he was most gifted –all kinds of athletic and sporting activities. Action was his antidote and anodyne. She became “the rock” –as she described it, of the family and the household.  He became a teaching golf professional at the country club in Newark, Delaware, and was often away from the family being very successful as a golfer and in every other sport to which he turned as he grew older, including hunting and deep sea fishing with a marvelous group of friends –all, now,  gone, as is he.

A third child, Lois Randolph Young, whose musical talent  you have enjoyed, was born in February, 1951, and the family, always guided and led by Bea, developed; moving from a little house to a bigger house in Newark, and into a comfortable middle class life. When all her  children were going to school, Bea felt free to take up her avocation, which was acting, a specialty of her mother’s sister Lois Smith , who had directed the Drama Department at the College Settlement in Philadelphia and her mother’s  cousin Pamela Colman Smith who had been an actress with the Lyceum Theatre group in New York City  and then a theatre designer in the atelier of Edward Burne-Jones in London, England.  Some of you had the pleasure, as we children did in our adolescences, of attending Bea’s performances. Her gift was for character study and getting into character; untrained, she was a natural Method Actor. Even when she read plays and novels, which she did all her life with great enjoyment, she had little interest in plot, but great absorption in character.  In her later life,  when she was less active, she read mystery novels, enjoying traveling and adventuring vicariously, but even then she had little interest in the mysteries or the intricacies of the plots. She chose her writers for their gifts as character portraitists.  Not Agatha Christie, but P.D. James.

In the University Drama Group  in Newark, as in all the many theatre groups she worked with for over fifty years, Bea was known for her versatility. She could do comic characters, and she could do dramatic or tragic ones.  Her favorite role, which many of her fans judged her best, and which won her a sterling review in 1965 from Otto Dekom, the best (and the most curmudgeonly) local reviewer, was Amanda Wingfield, the mother in Tennessee Williams’ 1945 play “The Glass Menagerie.”  Most theatre historians would agree that this play lifted  American theatre into its post-War flourishing, and that Laurette Taylor’s Amanda set a new standard for the finest American actresses –all Bea’s heroines–each of whom had a turn as Amanda on the stage or in the cinema: Maureen Stapleton, Jessica Tandy, Julie Harris, Katharine Hepburn, Joanne Woodward, and on and on.

For Bea Sutton, Amanda was exactly the kind of mother she did not want to be: one who, out of her own pain and feeling of abandonment when her husband left her,  aimed a suffocating love at  her two children, trying to save them from impoverishment and social shame, but destroying them because she could not confront what had happened to her when the children were small,  and could not speak of her daughter Laura’s physical disability and  and mental illness, her obsession with the fragile little glass animals in her menagerie.

During those community theatre years, in the late 1950s  and 1960s,  Bea met and worked with Ernie Sutton,  who versatiley acted, directed, built sets, and stage managed. They were friends who never, then, imagined that they would marry each other. He and his wife Janet Sutton had three young children and he had a taxing, exciting job as a chemical engineer and plant manager for Thiokol in Elkton, Maryland.  But Janet, who had an undetected brain aneurism, died suddenly in 1974, leaving  him, deeply grieving,  to finish the raising of Jane, Douglas, and Andrea, who was only ten at the  time.

In 1972, Bea and Gibby Young separated and two years later divorced. The collapse of their relationship had a long pre-history of growing apart, she into greater liberality, he into greater conservativism, but it was precipitated in 1972, when Gibby suffered a near-fatal heart attack.  For a man of  his kind of commitment to action, to sports, to physical prowess and strength, his illness was devastating. He eventually recovered, but he recovered in a mode of reckless demonstration that he was still a hale and hearty man, not a weakened or traumatized one.  Bea  was unable to help him as she had when he returned from the War physically intact but mentally traumatized. He lived, but she lost him as he step by step left their marriage. Abandoned, she lost her own way as well –for the first and only time in her life.  Suffering from sequential anxiety attacks and depression, she had her own version of “nervous spells,” for which she was hospitalized and treated psychopharmicologically.  While she was hospitalized, her own mother took a leadership role in making sure that there was no silence, no secrecy, no stigmatization about her daughter’s  illness, even though she was terrified that Bea had somehow inherited her own mother’s illness and would never return from the sanatorium-hospital. She feared Bea would vanish.

When Bea did recover, she and Ernie Sutton, both without partners, both trying to find their ways and reorient themselves, began to meet for dinner, to go to the theatre, date, share a home, and, after some time, consider marrying each other and merging their two families –their six children—thus making Bea a step-mother, a role she played as well as she had the role of mother.  A marriage of people better suited to each other is hard to imagine, and for thirty-six years theirs was an exemplary marriage. A marriage that was truly –to use an old-fashioned word— companionate.  Over the days since Bea Sutton died, Ernie has said to me many times that what he will miss most now is their talking, their shared commitment to and pleasure in talking about everything –everything joyful and good, and everything difficult and troubling. Everything, no holds barred. She cultivated this pleasure in him, drew out his capacity for it

Bea Sutton lived a life in which she never stopped growing as a person and in her relationships. She did not become an Amanda, unable to understand her past or find a future in which she could love and love more richly.  And in her second marriage, she continued to evolve –in tandem.  She was always anticipating trouble, and carefully preparing herself to meet it; although when her anxiety proved unfounded, as it often did, she had the grace and wit to flash one of her wide, warm smiles and say “false alarm!”  Or “well, it is always good to take your umbrella!”  After she began a telephone conversation with me by asking “is everything alright with you, darling?”  she would laugh at herself and say “I should just let you say if you have a problem so that, if you don’t, we can just get right to talking about the good things you are doing!”  Basically, she wanted everyone to grow and be creative in their living, their art of living and their art, as she herself had worked to do. “Ernie,” she said to me once,” was always a very, very clever man, a real scientist, and now he is also very wise. Everyone should be so fortunate.”

When her physical strength began to decline, and particularly during the last year, when she developed congestive heart failure, she prepared herself for her death –she made the memorial  arrangements we are carrying out today, writing a letter to Ernie and to the three of us, her children, saying what she wanted; she even wrote her own obituary, which, characteristically, said nothing in praise of herself, only  the conventional notation that she was “the beloved wife” of her husband.  So Ernie and I had to rewrite it a bit to gesture at why she was beloved.  Today, I have tried to say more about this, on behalf of all who loved her and respected profoundly how she endured her sorrows,  treasured her joys, and made of the mix a character of rare, uplifting  magnaminity.