Betsy's husband Victor Pollak gave this eulogy at the memorial service on November 2, 2019.

Marrying Betsy Russell is the greatest thing that ever happened to me. 

My attraction to Betsy in the early days started with her long hair, her bawdy sense of humor, her fancy cooking, and, as she liked to tell, I first had thoughts of a permanent liaison with her when, during our last year at Antioch College in Ohio, I came looking for her one day and found her lying on her back on the ground, doing fiberglass body work on her old red Saab sedan. 

We remained just friends for nine years before marrying. For most of those nine we were in different cities. But only a year or two into our friendship I felt her positive impact on me in so many ways. 

Betsy was a planner. Her planning pervaded her life and mine. Just being around her drove me to make plans and act on them. When she chose to do something, she found a way to make it happen. And she had a unique capacity to make decisions—a quality essential for a pathologist. After her first cancer diagnosis and big surgery in mid-2012, her planning took on more intensity. Her world—and mine—turned upside down. She was determined to make every hour of every day count. It was exhausting but I am grateful that we had seven years in which to carry it out. 

Soon we agreed we’d always plan things to which she could look forward, near-term things and long-term things. And we’d plan for the best, not the worst. We’d make plans assuming that she would experience a long progression-free remission. So, almost immediately—even during her first 18 weeks of chemotherapy—we planned our next international trip, a two-week river cruise in December from Budapest to Amsterdam, fourteen cities in fourteen days,—but from a very small cruise boat docked in town where she could skip some walking tours and rest. During the next six years we took annual trips, including a three-week drive through rural France and then Road Scholar small group tours—with some extensions of our own —in Europe, Peru, Ecuador and Portugal. 

Betsy was a life-long reader. But, for her, books were more than a source of knowledge and pleasure. They were tools, and she employed them. 

She had read a lot of memoirs, but when her cancer struck, she read every one she could find that had been written by a writer suffering from a life-threatening condition; and she read books on the subject of death and dying. Both as a pathologist, and one who had dealt with her own chronic depression, she had given a lot of thought to death and dying. She shared those thoughts in her testimony to the Utah legislature in the campaign for legislation to permit physician assisted death (or death with dignity) and, at the request of a University professor, gave a presentation to a class about it.  

In his book Being Mortal, surgeon Atul Gawnde, writes that, “Being mortal is about the struggle to cope with the constraints of our biology, with the limits set by genes and cells and flesh and bone. Medical science has given us remarkable power to push against those limits … but such power is finite and always will be.”

Betsy knew she had to come to some understanding of what the larger aims of her life were in her predicament, and what her fears were. Her greatest fears were of loss of control and of the pain that consumes many ovarian cancer patients, and she faced them with courage. She explored those issues, and she and I came to understand that a patient’s attitude toward them can change over time. She sought to achieve at least one more progression-free remission so that she could live again in a mental state not defined by her cancer, with at least one more stretch free of that constraint, enjoying the things she most cherished. But early in her disease she embraced Viktor Frankl’s insight that—regardless of outcome—nothing could take from her the freedom to choose how to respond—to control what she would feel and do about what happens to her.

Betsy had a life-long antipathy toward uncertainty. The overwhelming aspect of an advanced cancer diagnosis is the uncertainty it thrusts on the patient. She had been told following her initial surgery in 2012 that she had less than a 20% chance of surviving five years. Once that surgery and her chemotherapy and wound healing had been completed, she and I faced her quarterly blood tests and periodic CT scans to check for recurrence that caused her anxiety to intensify. It grew each quarter until she received results, then dissipated briefly with each negative test result, and then resumed its intensifying path. 

Her first recurrence, in 2016, was treated with surgery and more chemotherapy, and her cancer went back into remission. She had been told that for most patients each remission after recurrence can be expected to last about half as long as the preceding one.  

She suffered a second recurrence in 2017 that was not susceptible to surgery. So she entered a clinical trial in late 2017 that required an infusion every three weeks back at the same hospital, and many of the predicted side effects set her back and had to be managed with additional drugs, changes in dosage and a lot of waiting. The trial gave her nearly two years of additional remission, and we made the best of it.  

But by this past February, she was suffering from fatigue, difficulty eating, and soon painful spinal fractures that led to another hospitalization and a diagnosis that she’d developed a second form of cancer. Even then the doctors had a strategy for treatment. It would be a challenging treatment with difficult potential side effects, but with prospects for nine or ten years more of active life. So we decided to follow through with our plan to move down to Tucson to live near her sister Nancy and brother Jon and his wife Suzy, and we managed to transfer her care to the medical center there, aiming for her to undergo a bone marrow transplant.  We had some very good times with her family in Arizona. But in August, her condition worsened and led to a diagnosis of an aggressive form of a third cancer—that she knew would overwhelm her. She made her decision to enter hospice soon after receiving that new diagnosis, the news delivered to her courageously and lovingly—in unvarnished truth—by her doctor in Tucson. Ten days later her death came in a benign and peaceful setting surrounded by her family and friends. We are grateful that at the end Betsy—by entering hospice—avoided most of the terminal pain and suffering she had feared. 

I am grateful for the remembrances that so many of you who are here today have posted on the website Rachel created for Betsy. Your posts reveal that Betsy inspired you. 

In those remembrances, you wrote, with love and respect, of her enthusiasm, passion, intensity, sensitivity, feistiness, determination, intellect, imagination, caring and other qualities, describing her in many ways, including as, brave, worldly, smart and literate, competitive, with unflagging spirit and energy, and as engaged, direct, exuberant, unabashed, down to earth, warm and inspirational. 

There is an element reflected by those posts that I’d like to highlight: It is virtue. 

Betsy’s life was virtuous because, in living it, she adhered to high standards. She lived it well and she examined it continually. She kept journals frequently; and she matched the way she lived to her high standards. 

Betsy spoke the truth. You never had to guess what was on her mind. She said it. To speak truth was a core value of hers, and she wove it into the tapestry of her life. 

She exhibited self-control and delayed gratification to a high level. In triathlon, after all, 90% of the effort is in the training—a part she came to enjoy.

She embodied diligence and fortitude, restraint and kindness. Her own deliberation led her to honesty and generosity. She walked the talk. 

She read books to quench her thirst for learning. She thought about them. She reached conclusions about what they said and she applied them. And from books, she learned lessons about character and motivation and truth—books by Shakespeare, and books of history, and a lot of contemporary books, and she put them to use.

Rachel made a sign for our kitchen that reads “Life is too short to drink bad coffee.”  Betsy lived her life under a similar guiding principle: life is too short to waste any day, any hour. Shortly after she woke most mornings, she picked up a book and devoured chapters before getting up—sometimes taking time to read the New York Times morning briefing, but often not. She did everything deliberately. During her long drives to work over the years and at the gym, she listened to hundreds of teaching company lectures about history, music, literature, history of Western thought, and other subjects she had not had time to study in school. She participated in two book groups for years. She took language and writing classes and participated in writing conferences and a writing group, and she completed almost half of program for a Master of Fine Arts degree in writing. 

Each year before our annual August visit for a week to the Shakespeare Festival she would read, or re-read, all or most that year’s Shakespeare plays, and multiple commentaries.  

Her life exemplifies the examined life well lived. I hope she inspires others as she did me.

While I worked in offices for all of our marriage, she did more and did it well.  After finishing medical school and her internship, she entered her pathology residency, and while there bore our first child, and after her residency worked full time until she bore our second child. She handled the major tasks of raising our kids. I did my share but always—until she got sick—I operated under a caveat that things may come up in my work that would require a change of schedule. For her, no such caveat was possible. She planned most meals and did most cooking, handled most parent-teacher conferences and most family bookkeeping, hired and supervised the housecleaners and daycare, attended the kids’ sporting events, wrote the Christmas letters, maintained contact with her family and mine, did birthdays and Christmas and Thanksgiving and stood by me when I lost a business and when I took time to recover and return to law practice. And for most of our marriage she did all of it while working full time and developing a reputation as a sharp pathologist and valued colleague. 

I will miss so much of Betsy. When I wake in the morning it feels like something has been amputated from my being: The part of me that had come into being because of Betsy—that sense of Betsy that I have carried within me. I hope to remember those intimate interactions in which we touched spirits, minds and hearts. I imagine that in a sense I’ll feel like a person who has undergone an amputation of an arm may feel as muscle memories, like remembering lifting a cup of coffee. But in my case, I’ll remember completing one of Betsy’s sentences, as we used to do for each other, or rubbing her ear as we listened to a performance at the symphony or while watching a movie.         

 As I now look forward to enjoying our adult children in their own marriages and nurturing their own families—and Betsy’s reflections in them—what more can one ask after half a century with such a life companion?

Betsy's friend C. Michael Weldon-Linne gave this eulogy at the memorial service on November 2, 2019.

Betsy and I both graduated from Northwestern University Medical School in Chicago (she by a more circuitous route than I that you might be able to cajole Vic to explain to you sometime if you don’t already know the backstory) – but she was a year behind me in matriculation so we never crossed paths as students.  As it turns out, we both reached the same conclusion, she again in a slightly more roundabout fashion than I, that we were not cut out for direct patient care medicine and consequently gravitated to the specialty of pathology. As luck, or I would prefer to think good fortune, would have it we both chose Evanston Hospital on Chicago’s north shore as the site of our training – I was 2 years her senior in the program, and eventually her Chief Resident, but Betsy was never less than a fully capable and knowledgeable peer.  We quickly became good friends and soon discovered that we lived in the same city and were both married to aspiring attorneys – so before long we came to be a party of 4 and later would welcome, collectively, 5 children and share the trials, tribulations, and joys of parenthood. Among many great times together I still particularly remember watching the Bears win Super Bowl 20 (parenthetically the only one they ever won and maybe the only on the New England Patriots ever lost) in Betsy & Victor’s Oak Park basement in January of 1986, accompanied by pre-schooler Rachel, baby Ben and our 2 daughters at the time – a toddler and a baby just younger than Ben.  And while this might not mean much to those among you who have lived your entire lives this side of the Mississippi, Betsy was a huge Walter Payton fan.

Betsy and I received our residency training under the tutelage of an old-school Prussian Chairman who maintained that the best pathologists learn their anatomic and pathophysiology skills in the autopsy suite - “Mortui vivos docent”: a classical Latin phrase that translates as “The Dead Teach the Living” – it was a sign that hung above the entrance to the hospital morgue. Autopsy service is a minimal if not almost entirely absent part of modern 21st century hospital pathology practice but Betsy and I each performed over 100 postmortem examinations in the course of our training nearly 40 years ago and both of us agreed that our Chairman’s perspective was a valid one.  We excelled in our chosen specialty, and Betsy was one of the finest pathologists I have had the pleasure of knowing, at least in part because of the wisdom imparted by the reverent and exacting study of the pathology on display in our deceased patients.

But I have come to appreciate, in my advancing years, that the concept of the dead educating the living has metaphysical as well as medical implications.  We are gathered here today to celebrate the contributions that Betsy has made to all of our lives and those of others – but although no one would contend that she was anything other than greatly cherished and appreciated during her time with us, it is usually only upon the occasion of one’s demise that we take the opportunity to critically and comprehensively look back on the life and works of a loved one and seriously reflect on the legacy they have left us – such is the nature of the human condition.  With that in mind I could go on endlessly about the lessons learned, advice taken, criticism reluctantly accepted, and love and encouragement received from Betsy since we first met as nascent pathologists - but family, friends and colleagues have already posted many moving comments on the memorial website and others, like my wife, have already spoken or will speak today, more eloquently than I, about this incredible woman - so I will defer, to borrow a phrase from Betsy’s beloved Bard of Avon, from “adding yet another hue unto the rainbow.”  Instead, I would like to further acknowledge Betsy’s appreciation of Shakespeare by concluding with a reading of his Sonnet number 74 – in which he eloquently asserts that we live on in spirit after death: a belief never more true than about the person we are here to honor and remember today. May Betsy’s passing give us pause to reflect and may her legacy and persistent spirit inform the manner in which we conduct our own lives going forward.

Sonnet 74

But be contented: when that fell arrest
Without all bail shall carry me away,
My life hath in this line some interest,
Which for memorial still with thee shall stay.
When thou reviewest this, thou dost review
The very part was consecrate to thee:
The earth can have but earth, which is his due;
My spirit is thine, the better part of me:
So then thou hast but lost the dregs of life,
The prey of worms, my body being dead,
The coward conquest of a wretch's knife,
Too base of thee to be remembered.
 The worth of that is that which it contains,
 And that is this, and this with thee remains.

Betsy's friend Madeleine Weldon-Linne gave this eulogy at the memorial service on November 2, 2019.

I was Betsy’s friend. No, I am Betsy’s friend.
Everyone in this church can say that.
Some of you can also add that Betsy is my wife, mother, sister, aunt, cousin, colleague…
But all of us will always say: “Betsy  is my friend”.
So what does that mean? What is a friend? I suggest that friends:

Teach us
Share with us
Laugh with us
Console us

TEACH

Betsy taught all of us different lessons at various times in our friendships. When I met Betsy, she was a Medical resident and pregnant. I was in law school and didn’t have any clue how a demanding Profession and motherhood could successfully and happily co-exist.

Betsy taught me, by her amazing example, and her well timed insights, that being both in the top of  your profession and being a loving, effective, and devoted mother was not only possible, but doing it all, and making it work, would make you happy!

SHARE

As our friend, Betsy shared opinions and meals. We shared stories and advice. We shared good news and bad news.  We shared our strength when one of us was weakened.  We shared our weakness when one of us needed to be strong.

LAUGH

As Betsy’s friend we laughed together. 

Betsy was in total, I think, a happy person, because she always eventually worked and fought her way back to JOY.

Betsy’s life was not seamless.
There were bumps, deep valleys and dark times.
But her drive and vision led her to a place where she could appreciate her life.
With that appreciation, she ended up smiling and laughing. 

CONSOLE

As we console each other now, we remember that we have all been consoled and comforted by Betsy at times in  our friendship.
Betsy was where we needed her to be.
Betsy said what we needed to hear.
Betsy did what we needed to be done.
Now, Betsy is here with us, by our remembering her, consoling us.

Let me end with  the words of Shakespeare. 
Sonnet 30
“But if the while I think on thee,
Dear friend,
All losses are restored and sorrows end."