Last Words

Jacquelyn Dowd Hall

My mother, Virginia, died last summer. A few weeks later, I dreamed that she was calling us together—me and my brother and three sisters, all children again. Something calamitous was about to happen. I left the room, and when I returned, she was gone. I could not believe that she would leave me. But then, I thought as I awoke, of course she would, as calmly as she had stood by me all my life.1	1
I have always thought that my relationship with my mother influenced and in some ways drove my work. When she died, I felt more keenly than ever how experience (mine, hers, that of earlier generations) interweaves with story (the ones I tell about her and that she wove around me) to shape the histories I write. It fell to me to write her obituary, and as I took up that most ordinary and yet, for me at least, most extraordinary of tasks, I found myself caught in the complexity of that interweaving, a complexity made strange and thus more piquant by the demands of a genre that offers such special permissions and imposes such peculiar restraints.	2
I felt called first to accuracy. It seemed terribly important to get the facts straight, to set down, in the humble form of chronicle, key events in the sequence in which they occurred. Yet I was writing not just a chronicle but a commemoration: with each choice I was saying what I value, asserting an ideal.2 Moreover, I was not choosing events and assigning significance alone. Every word had to have a meaning and resonance on which all five of her children could agree. Collaboration pushed at the boundaries both of chronicle and commemoration. We wanted a story, and not just a story but a well-made story, one that carried within its strict confines a mutually satisfying moral and political point.	3
A few months earlier, I had asked my mother what she remembered as the best years of her life, half expecting her answer to have something to do with us. She named the 1970s, when I was gone (pursuing graduate studies at Columbia University and starting my first job) and she went from being a secretary raising my younger sisters on her own to directing the Labor Action Coalition of New York, a pioneering effort to build a labor-based environmental movement. Made up of union locals, the group fought for municipal ownership of public utilities and against toxic chemicals and nuclear wastes, which threatened workers and the general public alike. I took that conversation as a mandate to tell a story that would turn on one of women's history's central tropes: the eruption, against the odds, of ordinary women into public life.   Virginia Dowd, working for the Labor Action Coaltion of New York in the mid-1970s. Courtesy Jacquelyn Dowd Hall.	. . .