Marissa

We knew it was coming soon, but we had hoped that the phone call wouldn’t come, at least for a while. But it did arrive yesterday. Our friend Marissa Irwin, who I discussed last month, died yesterday in Washington, D.C., succumbing to ovarian cancer at the age of 40. She is survived by her husband of 11 years, Hans Verlome, and by her family back in Connecticut.

It is distasteful, even horrible, to be forced to discuss someone you care about in the past tense. But that is where we are. Marissa was a true friend and genuinely fine person. She met Jill during their freshman year at Beloit and they became part of a larger circle of friends that was a typical gathering of people at our school. Marissa was a very bright young woman with an East Coast sensibility, but utterly lacking the pretensions that often come west with students who alight in Midwestern schools. She immersed herself in the hard sciences at Beloit, spending countless hours in the labs of Chamberlain Hall, diligently applying what she’d learned to various experiments and projects. In a small school like Beloit, you get to know most everyone. I met Marissa after I had graduated; I was working for the school at the time and still hung around campus a lot, and so our paths would cross regularly. The image lingers; Marissa, often with Jill and our friend Sue Law in tow, sitting at one of the long row of tables in Goody’s Bar, watching the passing parade intently, her dark eyes shining and an intermittent smile crossing her face. She enjoyed the camaraderie and laughed easily; it always seemed that she enjoyed escaping the confines of Chamberlain and joining the more devil-may-care collection of English and history majors you could always find at Goody’s.

We have a picture that was taken on Jill’s graduation day in 1988. The picture shows Jill and I sitting at a table with Marissa, Sue and Sue’s brother Bob, who did not attend Beloit but who frequently visited. The picture itself is unremarkable; it simply shows friends basking in the glow of accomplishment and preparing to find their way in the larger world. We all did go our separate ways, of course, not knowing what was ahead. What we could not have imagined is that one of us would be gone so soon. There is a lot more to this story, of course, and I’ll revisit it tomorrow.