In
Memoriam: Marian Frances Sorenson, nee Lorance
January
31, 2022
Today would have
been my late wife’s 75th birthday. Her name was Marian Frances, nee
Lorance, though we all knew her as Francie. We were married on November 25,
1972, in Eugene, Oregon. She died of breast cancer on July 31, 2002, in
Lynnwood, Washington. Francie was from Boise, Idaho. We met when we were both
students at the University of Oregon. Francie was bright, attractive, and (most
of the time at least) fun to be with. When we were married I was a graduate
student in Russian history at the University of Washington. Francie came to
Seattle to be with me on June 2, 1972. It was the happiest day of my life.
Francie and I had two children together, Matthew, born on January 2, 1974, and
Mary, born on October 5, 1977. They’ve both turned out to be wonderful adults
who are still a joy to me all these years later. I attribute any parenting
success we had with them mostly by far to Francie.
When Francie came
to Seattle in 1972 she thought she was marrying a future college professor of
Russian history. But there were no, or nearly no, such jobs to be had in 1977
when got my degree. I spent the next year not knowing what I would do
professionally, but eventually I decided to go to law school. Francie always
said I just sprang that decision on her without our having talked about it at
all. That’s not quite how I remember it, but she was probably right. Sorry
about that, dear. In any event she was married not to a future college
professor but to a future lawyer. Much later in life it turned out that she was
married to a seminarian who became a church pastor. She took all those changes
in my professional life in stride with very good grace. Thank you dear.
In 1975 I was
awarded an IREX/Fulbright Fellowship to spend the 1975-76 academic year in
Russia doing dissertation research. Francie knew I had applied, but we hadn’t
yet gotten an acceptance. Then I got the phone call. I got it. At the time
Francie was working as a secretary in the Oceanography Department of the
University of Washington. I’ll never forget calling her and saying, “Hi. Want
to go to Russia?” Thank God she said yes. It was a very courageous yes. Russia,
at that time Soviet Russia, was a very foreign and somewhat frightening place.
I had been there for five weeks on a Russian language program from Indiana
University in the summer of 1968, so I knew a little of what it would be like
to be there. Francie had learned some Russian by this time, though not much.
Russia was my thing not hers.
That year in
Russia became the greatest adventure of our lives other perhaps than rearing
children. We lived in a couple of small rooms in a dormitory wing of the big
Moscow State University building south of downtown Moscow. Fortunately there
were other Americans living in the same wing. Francie became friends with some
of them, especially with one family from Alaska who had a son about the same
age as Matthew. It was not an easy year for Francie. Doing anything in in
Soviet Russia took easily twice as long as it would at home. The Russian winter
was as ferocious as it is reputed to be. Soviet dairy products made Matthew
horribly sick. Thank God we could get Finnish milk at the American embassy. Francie
had to deal with all of the hardships of raising a toddler under very difficult
circumstances mostly by herself. I spend all of every weekday at the Lenin
Library or at some archive or other doing my dissertation research. In the
spring for four weeks I spent four days a week in what was then Leningrad
working in an archive there. I had a room at Leningrad State University, but
we’d been told Francie and Matthew shouldn’t go with me because that university
didn’t have the housing available that the Moscow university did and because
the drinking water in Leningrad was contaminated with giardia. It was there
that we started to attend church for the first time in our adult lives. We were
active in the Anglo-American Church attached to the British and American
embassies. Francie was such a trooper. She handled it all so very well. Thank
you dear.
Five years later,
as I was graduating from law school, I received two job offers. One was in
Eugene, where I was finishing up my time at the University of Oregon School of
Law. The other was from one of the major downtown Seattle law firms. In the
year between the time I got my PhD and the time we went back to Eugene for law
school, Francie had taken a class in American Sign Language offered by a
Seattle church. She was hooked. We knew that at that time one of the best ASL
interpreter training programs in the country was at Seattle Central Community
College. Francie wanted to enroll in it. Her preference for Seattle and the
interpreter training program at Seattle Central CC made the decision of which
job to accept easier than it otherwise would have been. I accepted the offer
from Seattle, and in the early summer of 1981 we moved back to the city where
we had previously spent something like nine years of our lives, less one for
the time we were in Russia.
Francie did
indeed attend and graduate from that interpreter training program. I was an AA
program, but it felt more like graduate school. When she completed the course
after a couple of years she became a certified, professional sign language
interpreter. That would be her profession until near the end of her life when
she got too sick to work. She was by all accounts a very good sign language
interpreter. She developed something of a specialty in interpreting for
Deaf-Blind clients, which involves holding the client’s hands so that they can
feel the signs the interpreter is making. It became routine at our house for
Francie to spend time nearly every evening filing her fingernails. Fingernails
interfere with interpreting for Deaf-Blind clients. After she had been working
as an interpreter for a few years she and a few of her interpreter colleagues
with whom she had become friends formed a joint interpreting practice they
called SignOn. It became quite a success and an important institution for the
Deaf in western Washington.
Beginning about
in early 1994 Francie and I entered what would be the most difficult time of our
relationship except of course for her terminal illness. I had left the downtown
law world, where I had become a good if not a great trial lawyer. I was trying
to conduct a solo law practice in Edmonds, Washington, where Francie and I had
bought a house several years earlier. By 1994 I had begun to burn out on law. I
wasn’t making any money. I wasn’t attracting clients. One day Francie and our
daughter Mary, who was still in high school at the time, sat me down in our
living room. Mary said, “Dad, you’re depressed.” She meant I had clinical
depression; and though it had never occurred to me that I did, she was right. I started on anti-depressive medication
shortly thereafter. Still, I know that for the next three plus years I was
difficult to live with. I still wasn’t making any money. I suppose I was less
clinically depressed than I had been before I went on antidepressants, but I
was still sour and frustrated most of the time. I know I was no fun to live
with at all. As I look back on those years I can’t figure out why Francie
didn’t leave me, but I thank God that she didn’t. Her commitment to me and to
our children was so strong that she stuck it out with me. She took over making
family decisions that I was in no condition to make. She decided we had to sell
the boat we had purchased a few years earlier that I really loved. She decided
that we had to sell our house in Edmonds and move into something smaller and
cheaper. It was good that both of the kids were off on their own by then. She
took over when I couldn’t, and she did it brilliantly. She certainly was right
about selling the boat and the house, painful as doing so was.
Early in 1997 I
learned the School of Theology and Ministry of Seattle University, a Jesuit,
Roman Catholic university, was creating a way for Protestant students to earn
an MDiv or other ministry degree. The School had offered a fully accredited
Master of Divinity degree form some time by then. (I always find the name of that
degree to be odd. I have the degree, but I certainly have not mastered
divinity.) They’d had a few Protestant students before; but now, in cooperation
with several non-Catholic denominations, including my United Church of Christ,
they were gearing up to receive a much greater number of those non-Catholic
students. Somehow I just knew I had to go. I don’t know why. I didn’t know what
I would do with an MDiv. It hadn’t yet occurred to me that parish ministry was
my calling. Thank God the Holy Spirit knew me better than I did. I told Francie
I had to do it. I don’t think she understood why I had to, but then neither did
I. She raised only one, perfectly appropriate question. How are you going to
pay for it? I said I didn’t know but that I would go into debt if I had to (and
it turned out I had to). I don’t think she liked that prospect much, but she
never tried to stop me.
Now the really
hard part. In the early 1990s Francie was diagnosed with breast cancer. She had
to undergo a mastectomy. As they were taking her in for the surgery she said to
me, “I don’t want to do this.” I said, “It’s OK. We have to get you well.” After
the surgery her oncologist said it was up to her whether or not to do follow up
chemotherapy. The statistics the doctor gave us made it sound like the chances
of the cancer recurring were low because they’d gotten it early. The statistics
said that chemo wouldn’t reduce those chances some but not all that much.
Francie decided not to do it.
Our lives went on
pretty much as before. I don’t think either of us thought about Francie’s
history of cancer much. Then, in 2000, just as I was finishing my MDiv studies,
Francie started to complain about pain in her hip. She wanted to ignore it, but
I finally prevailed on her to go see her doctor. When we got the diagnosis the
news was not good. Francie’s hip hurt because the breast cancer from years
earlier had metastasized to her bones. She was referred to an oncologist. He
put her on some medication the name of which I don’t remember. It had few if any
side effects, but it was supposed to keep the cancer in check at least for a
while. The doctor said we could probably manage the cancer with that medication
for many years. It is of course never good to have cancer, but we felt somewhat
relieved.
Francie went in
for periodic checkups. After one of them the oncologist’s office called and
said Francie needed to come in. We feared that that meant bad news. I went with
her of course. I’ll never forget standing with her in the parking garage of the
oncologist’s building waiting for an elevator. Francie said, “I’m scared.” I
said, “So am I.” The news we got was indeed very, very bad. Francie’s cancer
had spread to her liver. It had grown there quite substantially. I won’t go
into all the details here, but we knew that now Francie’s cancer was terminal. We
went home, and both of us cried.
Shortly
thereafter I went to a worship service that included the hymn “Won’t You Let Me
Be Your Servant.” I went home from that service and typed out two of the verses
from that hymn. They were:
I will hold the
Christ-light for you
in the shadow of
your fear;
I will hold my
hand out to you,
speak the peace
you long to hear.
And:
I will weep when
you are weeping;
when you laugh
I’ll laugh with you.
I will share your
joy and sorrow
till we’ve seen
this journey through.
I gave Francie those verses as my
pledge to her for the difficult journey we both knew lay ahead and that we both
knew we had to see through. In all the years thereafter when I served as a
parish pastor I never used that hymn in any service. I couldn’t. It doesn’t
much enhance a worship service to have the pastor up there sobbing. I tear up
even now as I write these words.
In early July,
2002, Francie entered hospice care in our condominium home in Lynnwood. I had
been a parish pastor for only a few months by then. Before she got too sick to
say much of anything Francie said a couple of powerful things to me. She said
that I would be the one who would still be here and that I shouldn’t let any
thoughts of her interfere with my living my life. That sentiment is the
greatest gift a dying person can give a loved one, and Francie gave it to me.
About my being a parish pastor she said, “I am so glad you finally are who you
really are.” That is the best affirmation of my decision to go into ministry I
have ever received or ever could receive. Thank you, dear.
On the evening of
Wednesday, July 31, 2002, I sat in our bedroom where Francie was in her hospice
bed clearly very close to death. Our daughter Mary was with us. Our son Matthew
was at work at the Everett Fire Department, perhaps a twenty or thirty minute
drive away. Either Mary or I called him and said you’d better get down here. At
10:45 pm Francie stopped breathing. She was gone. It was over. Matthew hadn’t made
it there yet but arrived a short time later. Francie was enrolled in a pre-paid
mortuary plan. After a while I called them. They put Francie’s body in a zipper
cover. I will never forget watching them wheel her lifeless body in that cover
out of our home. I was devastated. To some extent I still am.
Francie wasn’t
particularly religious, but in her way she was more spiritual than I am. During
her last hospitalization, when she was having a very, very bad time, she had a
vision. She saw herself and me held in God’s hands, and she knew that we were
safe there. When we buried her ashes at a local cemetery we put on the grave
marker, “Safe in God’s Hands.” She was, and she is. One day my ashes will be
buried beneath that marker along with hers.
What more can I
say about Francie? Her love for me enriched my life in ways and to an extent I
cannot even begin to express. I hope that my love for her enriched her life
too. She was a wonderful mother to our children. Nothing either of them could
have done would have diminished her love for them in any way. They lost her far
too soon, and they still miss her horribly. She devoted her professional life
to serving Deaf and Deaf-Blind persons, helping them make their way in an
uncomprehending and to a large extent uncaring world. She was the first love of
my life. I can’t even imagine how poor my life would have been without her. Rest
in peace, dear. Of course I will never forget you. I hope and pray that we will
meet again in a life beyond this life. May it be so.
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