Reverend Hazel Vivian Staats-Westover

Reverend Hazel Vivian Staats-Westover, 92 A beautiful person died February 21, 2016 in a flood of love and peace and hopefully a little bump of morphine. The Reverend Hazel Vivian Staats-Westover: a so-so cook, a too-fast driver, an insomniac, a giggler, a feminist, a leftist, an activist and a Christian. She grew up Dutch in rural New Jersey between the wars, riding horses, going to the one-room schoolhouse where her mother was the only teacher, and playing the organ in the Griggstown Reformed Church. She and her younger brother Lloyd had a musical revue that launched a lifetime of musicianship. She had perfect pitch, toured playing a silver trumpet in an all-girls brass band, and well into her 90s she would twist her face up and sight-read full scores and sing soprano alongside. The full sweep of her life is too big for a Facebook post: there are countless interviews and citations (Feminists who Changed America, 1963-1975!) and little dictaphone tapes where she told her stories, and we’ll have to put it all together at some later date. For now, the abridged version: after her father had died young in a car crash, she went west to USC and then to Chicago Theological Seminary and Harvard Divinity School. She ministered to Japanese internment camp survivors. She housed and mentored a young Jesse Jackson in Southside Chicago while he organized Martin Luther King’s Operation Breadbasket (please listen to Cannonball Adderley’s Country Preacher, which was recorded at that time, about that time). She spoke in front of 100,000 people at a socialist antiwar rally in Paris, sharing the dais with Madame Nguyen Thi Binh. She was a chaplain and the first director of the Women’s Center at Princeton University after they began admitting women in the 70’s. When a great-granddaughter of hers had a third-grade history lesson about the Roosevelts, Hazel was pleased to pitch in. She had, after all, lunched with Eleanor. She married twice in her life. Her first husband was the father of her two children Dawn and Allan, a preacher turned civil rights activist who left her during the full ardor of the free love era. Her second husband was an ex-Marine and lifelong Republican who adored her, adorably, until his death last year, even as she posted STAND UP TO THE NRA petitions all over Facebook. As fitting for someone who worked on a version of the Bible with all the male pronouns taken out (think HERstory, but over the entire King James Bible), Hazel was a massive Hillary supporter, even if her politics were more Bernie. It’s bittersweet to think Clinton will win but Hazel won’t be here to see it. The Clintons, for their part, have a huge responsibility not to play cynical with the support of women like Hazel, who shouldered the struggle for decades. She fought a non-binary fight, for women’s rights but also for love and economic justice and inclusion of all kinds. Hazel had been officiating ceremonies for same-sex couples for years before it was legal marriage. When it came time for her to officiate a grandson’s wedding, she happily suggested that for the multi-faith non-believer couple that she could put a brown paper book cover over her Bible so the Buddhists and Jews and Christians would all feel equally welcome. Despite her lifetime in the ministry, Hazel was never content to parrot scripture as if it held incontrovertible truths (it was, after all, written by men). She always had more questions than answers, and death was no different. She spent much of this winter at her daughter’s home in Key West dying rather cheerfully, with an out-loud sense of wonder. “This is so fascinating,” she would say. “I get to see what life is all about.” The hospice doctor came in the week after Christmas and had the kind of warm bedside chat that hospice is so good for. Grandma told him some abbreviated version of her travelsinto East Germany, the Soviet Union, to China for the UN’s World Conference on Womenand he asked her why she traveled so much. “I just wanted to MEET all these PEOPLE out there,” she said in the jolly all-caps emphatics she used for everything. “Just to see who they ARE, see what makes us all HUMAN.” Her family is in awe of everything she did and saw in her life. She shaped many lives. But for family, she left a simpler example: optimism and joy to the last. “I don’t know where I’m going after this,” she said not long before she died, “but I’m sure it’s going to be great.” In that great place, wherever it is, she might rejoin her son, Allan. She is survived by her daughter Dawn; her grandsons Charles, David, Nathan, Leslie, Robert, and Florent; six great-grandchildren; and Bob Staats-Westover’s three children; Douglas, Diane and Bryce, grandchildren Peter, Stephen, Mark, Michael, Anna and John; and ten great-grandchildren. Written by her grandson Nathan, transmitted with great love through Dawn Thornburgh, blessed to be her daughter…. A Celebration of her Life and Memorial Service will be held on March 26th at 10 AM at the University Chapel at Princeton where she was ordained. In lieu of flowers, please contribute to your favorite charity: Hazel would encourage something to do with women’s issues, but will maintain, as always, her dedication to your right to choose.