By STEVEN JUPITER
CASTLETON—When a life ends as abruptly as Honorée Fleming’s, family and friends are left with a gaping, aggressive void where the deceased used to be. It was apparent at her Celebration of Life at Castleton University on Sunday, October 22 that Ms. Fleming had left a massive, excruciating vacuum in the lives of her family and friends, one which will never be refilled and which they will only gradually learn to live with.
The celebration was held in the auditorium of the Fine Arts building on the school’s campus, and the venue was full: family, friends, colleagues, students, and even total strangers just moved by the circumstances of Ms. Fleming’s passing.
On the stage, sat two small wooden coffers with Ms. Fleming’s ashes, surrounded by flowers beneath a projected slideshow of images of Ms. Fleming looking quite content in the life she’d built for herself and her family.
Her husband, writer Ron Powers, and her surviving son, Dean, spoke with evident pain and love at this violent loss, the second to strike their family: in 2005, Honorée and Ron lost their older son, Kevin, to suicide as a result of schizophrenia, a tragedy often alluded to in recent accounts of Ms. Fleming’s life but which was made explicit at Sunday’s event.
“Indomitable” was used more than once to describe Ms. Fleming, in reference not only to her ability to carry on after Kevin’s death, but also to her determination not to let her academic career be derailed after she was refused tenure at Middlebury College. She was a scientist, having gotten a PhD in biophysics from the elite University of Chicago in the 1970s, a time when STEM was even harder for women to break into than it is today. She left Middlebury for Trinity College in Burlington (now defunct) and then became Dean of Faculty at Castleton. She became a mentor to young women trying to make careers for themselves in academia. She became a role model for young academics in general, taking new faculty under her wing, nurturing them to coax out their fullest potential.
Ron Sherwin, Associate Professor of Music at UMass/Dartmouth, was once on the faculty at Castleton and recalled Ms. Fleming as a mentor who “changed [his] life.” Mr. Sherwin then sang “Precious Lord, Take My Hand” by Thomas Dorsey, accompanied on piano by Sarah McQuarrie.
Joe Mark, who hired Ms. Fleming at Castleton when he was Academic Dean, spoke with emotion as he remembered her as “the smartest person I’ve ever known” and as an exemplar of “decency, kindness, and compassion.”
“If you wanted truth, you asked Honorée,” he added.
Gail Freedman, a family friend who is producing the film version of Mr. Powers’s book “No One Cares about Crazy People,” called Ms. Fleming “one of the world’s true gifts to humanity” and lamented the “gentle haunting her love left behind.”
But the strongest, most affecting remarks came, naturally from her husband and son, who clearly drew enormous strength from her and must now navigate life without her.
“Mom may be the first agnostic saint,” joked her son, Dean. “She was more Christian in deeds than many who profess faith.”
“Every current in our household passed through Honorée,” said Ron Powers. “She made me happy on a scale I never knew existed. I hope I made her happy.”
Mr. Powers ended his remarks with “Fallen Majesty,” a poem by William Butler Yeats, in a nod to Ms. Fleming’s Irish roots:
Although crowds gathered once if she but showed her face,
And even old men’s eyes grew dim, this hand alone,
Like some last last courtier at a gypsy camping-place
Babbling of fallen majesty, records what’s gone.
These lineaments, a heart that laughter has made sweet,
These, these remain, but I record what’s gone. A crowd
Will gather, and not know it walks the very street
Whereon a thing once walked that seemed a burning cloud.
