Five days ago I got the call from my friend Dominic about Marshall’s death. Some section of my mind has been turning over the significance of his death, life and our relationship in the time since.
It’s been many years since I could imagine what my life would have been like without learning Nonviolent Communication and knowing Marshall as I did. Since the late ’90s I was privileged to know him, briefly as a student but with far more time spent as an organizer in Rochester as well as in Oakland during my time at BayNVC, as a fellow Center for Nonviolent Communication board member for five years and perhaps a little as a friend.
Like countless others, I’ve got hundreds of memories of Marshall. Some were infuriating, many hilarious. There were few small moments in his company for me (good, now the tears are finally flowing a little) from an exchange with a parking attendant as we left a Berkeley, CA lot to one of our first conversations during a Wisconsin IIT about bodhisattvas to bookstore visits in whatever part of the world we were in to seeing him calmly walk past heavily armed teens, guarding the boundaries of a favela in Rio.
In the days I spent time with him, I was elbow deep in raising and being raised by my kids. It was inspiration from him and especially from my first Nonviolent Communication teacher Rita Herzog that helped me in my early attempts to change my personality from impatient over-achiever to something more present and hopefully more loving. It was their influence that helped me to find a new way of relating to our son Alec who the world would view as my step-son when I wanted us to see each other outside those static labels.
Our oldest daughter Molly especially loved Marshall. She refused to go to school when he was in town. He would of course take her side, once memorably inquiring how it felt for me to be my daughter’s jailer!
I remember Marshall in Oakland very un-characteristically looking chagrined when I mentioned that my then 11 year old daughter Audrey liked how much he swore (at the time she was experimenting using swear words like an artist would try working in water colors or oils).
It was also due to my work with Marshall and CNVC that I traveled and was away a lot during what turned out to be the last years of Molly’s life. I still struggle with my choices then. And, it was due to the tremendous influence of the work in my life, marriage and relationships that my family survived as well as it did after her terrible sudden loss.
Marshall’s and Valentina’s home was one of the places where I spent time during those early months after Moll died, learning to accept the unacceptable. I will never forget how kind they were to Audrey and me. I won’t forget sitting in their dry Albuquerque backyard, reading Pema Chodron out loud to Moll as I did every day that year, to offer her spiritual food, the only contribution I had left to make to this beloved child.
Just last month while visiting Oakland, I walked past the church with my friend Annie where I helped to organize Marshall and Valentina’s 2005 wedding and where we held the West Coast memorial service for Moll less than two years later. At the time, I mentally marveled how our lives twined together in such unexpectedly wonderful and sad ways.
Today much of what I do as a leader relates to what I saw Marshall do, and not do. I saw him struggle with knowing how to become liberated from old structures, and I have never stopped studying systems as a result. I became a devotee of celebration and appreciation because of the struggles he had at times with offering appreciation, due to a fear he expressed to me, that people would interpret his gratitude as approval. I have become passionate about understanding how to use rank and privilege in the world as medicine, partly in reaction to Marshall’s struggles in that realm. Regardless of what he did or didn’t do, he never stopped teaching me.
Travel well, Marshall, and please continue your blessed trouble-making on the other side.
by Kit Miller
