Elizabeth E. Biddle ’83 died May 30, 2011.
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ELIZABETH E. BIDDLE ’83
It is with tremendous sorrow that we mourn the loss of Elizabeth Biddle, who died in her home in Rockport, Maine on May 30, 2011, after a two-year battle with breast cancer. Elizabeth died as she had lived, surrounded by her immediate and extended family and by the extraordinary community she had nurtured through the years: friends, neighbors, colleagues, co-workers of all ages and backgrounds, from school and church, from work and volunteering.
Our college friendship began during sophomore year, sparked by the excitement of Women’s Studies (in which Elizabeth subsequently majored) and the shared political activism and personal development inspired by life in Tyler Place. Although we lost touch when Elizabeth, fierce and unrelenting in her questioning, left the college (to graduate with the class of ’83), we reconnected fifteen years later, soon after I had moved to Boston upon the birth of my daughter. On that first visit to the beautiful clapboard house in Rockport, we went sailing—one of Elizabeth’s many life-long passions—and ate raspberries from her garden; in the years that followed I was fortunate to witness the rich unfolding of her professional and personal life. She started her own law practice, devoting time and resources to numerous local non-profit organizations and serving on the boards of many others. She found her partner and source of great strength in her husband, Joe Cox, and was an ardent and devoted mother to Rebecca Cox, 11, and to Xiara Cox, 6, whom the family fostered and then adopted. (Some of you may remember Xixi’s unremitting energy at our twenty-fifth reunion.) With each visit, I saw how the architectural additions to her house reflected the great life happening inside.
It was a life she fought to hold on to in the fullest possible way—throughout her diagnosis, her treatments, and her final months of palliative care. Choosing to live openly with her illness meant confronting, at all times, her own vulnerability, but it also enabled her to live in the present: to accept, with thoughtfulness and grace, the support of those whose lives she had touched, to seize with all her power the beauty of places and of relationships.
Visiting Elizabeth for the last time in the month before she died, I was struck by the way her passionate engagement with people and ideas seemed only to deepen as her strength ebbed. As we drank tea and talked, she interrogated me about my work as a college teacher, about making possible the kinds of learning we had experienced and continued to value. We looked at photos, shared memories, but most of all, we talked about our families, and what her ability to live inside the reality of her situation might mean for her own daughters’ ability to remember and to heal.
Elizabeth may well be the bravest person I have ever known, but her extraordinary courage was not her only gift. For herself and for those who loved her, she created a community based upon openness and great generosity. She will be greatly missed.
Shawn Maurer ’82
Since learning of Elizabeth’s diagnosis, I had shared with her the effects of my own mother’s