Mom & Dad bought a boat around 1970, and we learned to water ski up at Big Bear Lake.  Lisa would have been 11 or 12 at this time, and was a skinny but tall girl.  She was very determined to get things right and compete with her older brothers. Dad knew how to ski, so he told us to “hold on to the rope, lean back, yell Hit It, and eventually we would pop up on to our skis on top of the water”.  Sounded pretty simple.   

The first time Lisa tried it, she was concentrating on holding on to the rope so much, that when when she yelled “Hit It” and the boat took off, it popped her right up but then flopped her forward with her skis behind, but she wouldn’t let go of the rope!  Everybody was yelling “drop the rope, drop the rope”!  eventually we had to just cut the engine to keep from dragging her all over the lake!  Of course by the end of the week, she was skiing like it was a natural way to get around!  Within the next few years, she became quite the slalom skier, carving beautiful turns side to side, jumping the wake with strength and balance while skimming across the water at 30mph.  

One summer, when quite a few of our friends families were all out at Lake Mojave together with their boats, Lisa and I got this brilliant idea that we should try to get as many skiers up behind one boat as possible.  We had started successfully with 3 skiers at once many times, so we decided to have 3 people start behind our boat, each with 3 ropes.  Then we would get 3 other boats, each with 2 skiers, to chase us down and hand off their skier to our skiers extra rope! 

It occurred to us that the last hand-offs would have to be the best skiers since they would really have to race to catch up, so of course Lisa volunteered to go last on the fastest boat- she must have been doing 40+ mph on the water.  In the end, we did successfully hand off all the ropes  to 9 skiers!  By this time, there was a whole parade of boats following along to see what we were up to- it was quite the scene!  We decided that was a “Lake Record” and it probably still holds today. 

Lisa loved a challenge and generally accomplished what she set her mind to.

Lisa had some real aptitudes early on that shaped her chosen career as an adult.  

We kids were on our own one night in our early teens while Mom & Dad were out with friends.  Lisa and I were playing a game or something in the back of the house when Larry decided to make some tacos for dinner.  He put some oil in a frying pan to cook the tortilla shells in and turned the burner on high.  Well about this time, he got a call from a friend down the street to come on over for a few minutes, so he left.  

After a while, Lisa and I heard a whoosing!, popping!  sound from down the hall, so we looked out to see what was going on and we saw this flickering bright light from the kitchen, and began to smell smoke!  We ran down the hall and found the stove was on fire and flames were leaping up the ceiling and the kitchen was filling up with black smoke!!  

At first we ran out the front door to call the fire department from the neighbors house, but then Lisa shouted “ there isn’t time!  I’m going back in”  and before I knew it she was back in the kitchen, grabbing a large half full jar of pickles that happened to be sitting on the counter. She quickly filled it up with water, and then expertly heaved the contents right onto the base of the flames!!  Well amazingly, this did put out the fire, and after some of the smoke cleared it was evident that the ceiling had not caught on fire, but a few minutes more burning and it sure would have!  

Pretty soon Larry came back home and we all set about trying to clean up as much smoke and soot from the walls and ceilings as we could before the “parents” got home.  In the end everything was rescued, mostly due to Lisa’s quick thinking and action. 

So it did not surprise us that she got in to fire fighting during her career with the Forest Service, she seemed to have a natural understanding of what to do with fire; not to mention she kinda liked being the hero!  Thank Goodness!

 Lisa, and Margo both, are like the big sisters I never had… when Lisa passed, Margot asked that I write something to honor her, similar to tributes I’d written for other friends and family who had passed in the last year. Easy, it seemed - I write, it's what I do, it's who I am, a gift I could give, a friendship and a service I could offer.

Except this was different.

Margot didn't ask for an obituary notice, a brief but detailed sketch of a life, to be posted in the newspaper, to be read by friends or strangers who may have known one small aspect of our love-one’s life, but not the whole picture. I knew that Margot needed more. She did not actually ask, but what Margot needed was a public love letter, from her to her partner and lover and friend; she needed all those feelings for Lisa, looped and knitted inexorably into the very fabric of the person she is, to be laundered, pressed and ironed, lovingly mounted and framed and preserved, in such a way as they’d be forever real; as though a proper recounting of those feeling might, in some tangible way, bring Lisa back. Margot asked that I describe, to her absent Lisa, the day-to-day realities of life without her, and to communicate to Lisa, in memorium, in requiem, just how much she was and is loved, and missed.

She asked that I paint a chronological picture of the whole person Lisa was; descriptions of Lisa, the girl who threw her little tricycle over a wall because she wanted a proper bike like her brothers. Of Lisa the child who broke her arm and didn't tell anyone for two days, of Lisa the competitor who excelled, academically, athletically, as student and coworker and supervisor, as manager and partner and friend. Of the passionate Lisa, exhibition waterskiing, and playing basketball on scholarship for the U of M; of the driven Lisa, making her living delivering pizzas and hiking herself to exhilarated exhaustion in the backcountry of the Bob Marshall wilderness; the Lisa fighting fires and earning a Marine Corps challenge coin and the respect of the Jarheads who presented it to her; Lisa fishing the Everglades, and finishing top of her class at FLETC, and camping and cutting cordwood, and crabbing off the Oregon coast… ultimately, the Lisa with whom she had stood under a sacred tree, and promised herself to, for life…

…And it was too much for me. I knew Lisa a short time - her energy, her confidence and presence, her leadership and service, her laughter and comically yet fittingly innocent way of swearing, and so each time I sat down to write this tribute, I confess that I balked, and hesitated; I procrastinated, because I felt that anything I wrote, short of an exhaustive biography, couldn’t possibly convey about Lisa the true, full, depth of feeling and longing and loss that she, and Margot, deserve. Anything I wrote would be simply a long, ever-growing list of facts, that would fall far short of communicating to the world what our friend Lisa is, and was, and what my friend Margot needed and wanted and deserved to hear, about her partner in life.

So this is what I was able to come up with; this is my tribute. Friends and family who knew and loved Lisa more, and longer, than I, have been writing on the Forever Missed website for weeks now, and the stories they tell, the memories they share, they are what paints the faint and impressionistic picture of Lisa; they are the broken, pointilized tiles that viewed together, and from a distance, make up the mosaic of who she was, for us, to each other, and to the world, who knew her only a little or not at all. Helen Keller once wrote of loss, “I do not want the peace which passeth understanding, I want the understanding which bringeth peace”. While that sentiment may, under less trying circumstances, seem not a little sacreligious, I think under these circumstances, God is big enough to allow our questions, and our puzzled efforts to make sense of this loss. Everything I or anyone else writes is exactly that; trying to find peace, and trying to understand why our friend, our sister, our daughter, our lover, our partner, had to leave. And so instead, I close with this; I am thankful, for Lisa's friendship, and for having known her, for as Thornton Wilder said, "The greatest tribute to the dead is not grief, but gratitude."

So thank you, Lisa.

Glenville Kedie

September 2015.