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181 afterword “A very strong sense of what is right and of what is not right”1 Isabelle and I visited Ava Helen very recently, and she told us the story about the fish aquarium which had been empty, and she said something about its being empty, and that night Linus was a little late in getting home, and she wondered what on earth he was doing. He came in with two brimful sacks of fish to restock the aquarium, so she could see the fish. And she said, “I’ll have to be careful that I don’t say that I would want a horse.” —Unidentified woman at AHP’s memorial service, December 12, 1981 Tears are on this page! —Charles and Margaret Huggins to LP, December 19812 I think that she was a wonderful woman, just about perfect. —Linus Pauling, unmailed letter, March 19823 The family had already planned the memorial service. Actually, as Linus, Jr., confirmed at the service, Ava Helen had planned it. Peter Christiansen, minister at the Unitarian Church in Los Angeles for seven years, and then at Walnut Creek, conducted the service at the Palo Alto Unitarian Church. (Stephen Fritchman, minister emeritus at Los Angeles, was also ailing and would die about the same time as Ava Helen.) The Stanford-based group the Mendicants sang. Frank Catchpool, the young doctor at Schweitzer’s compound at Lambaréné so many years before, offered the eulogy. Catchpool had been a fan of Pauling’s before he met the chemist and peace proponent in Africa. He had accepted Pauling’s invitation to do a postdoc at Caltech, and had learned chemistry so he could work with Pauling on Ava Helen Pauling 182 medical research. They ended up collaborating on the molecular basis of anesthesia. Catchpool had become a close friend and trusted associate of the Paulings. He remembered those days in Lambaréné in 1959: his own comfort with the Paulings, as he had been raised Quaker and grown up around people talking about peace and justice, and how Ava Helen had disliked and challenged the “macho” tone of the hospital. But he also remembered that, at that time as throughout her life, she had made her challenges in a soft, “somewhat shy” voice, though “the words were precise and the meanings always very clear.” Frances Herring, Ava Helen’s peace colleague, took the floor for an astute and loving appraisal ofAva Helen’s style of activism. Herring comparedAva Helen to Vietnamese women she had known: “small and delicate and fraillooking , but when they’re defending the things they really believe in, just incredibly strong and brave.” She recalled Ava Helen’s activism in WILPF in the 1950s and into the 1960s, as she struggled against the red baiting of her organization colleagues. Herring also acknowledged Ava Helen’s complexity: her devotion to Linus, and beside that, her bold activism. [S]he refused to be wholly defined by her role as a wife and a mother. Sometimes, on a social occasion, when I would look across at Linus and Ava Helen, usually sitting on a couch, with his arm on the sofa in back of her, and his hand resting lightly on her shoulder, I would see in my mind’s eye her other roles—the way she worked so passionately with other independent women for the values they cherished most—human rights, economic justice, and peace. I remembered how she marched with Mary Clark[e] and the Women’s Strike for Peace, and addressed a huge anti-government gathering, demonstration in Queens, where many people were arrested and beaten up, and how, with other thoughtful women, she bearded the officials of NATO in their lair, in the Hague, and reasoned with them about the folly of bringing nuclear weapons into Europe poised against the Soviet Union. The memories drifted closer to home, to friends and family. An African American woman who described herself as a “live-in person” near the Paulings in Portola Valley told the assembly that Ava Helen had always invited her to pick the flowers from the Paulings’ garden to share with people who otherwise might not have flowers. Martha Acevedo recalled in wonderment that Ava Helen planned picnics and other gatherings in the last week of her life; when asked if she ever cried, Ava Helen had said no— then remembered a letter from her grandson Sascha that had made her cry. Longtime friend Alice Richards remembered her courage, femininity, and sheer...

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