September 12, 2025

Rest in Peace, Mom: Keeping ScOR #13

I never imagined I’d write about my mother in this newsletter. Keeping ScOR is meant to be about the stuff Scene on Radio traffics in – questions of social and economic justice, democracy, public policy. But the Second Wave feminists did say the personal is political. For my mother, Shirley (Ellis) Biewen, it certainly was.

Shirl, as we usually called her in my family, died on August 26, at 90. In the obituary that I wrote with help from my four siblings and Shirl’s surviving sister, I led with: “Family matriarch, therapist, school counselor and searching spirit Shirley Ann Biewen....”

One of my strongest early memories of her is from 1968. It was April, I guess, because Martin Luther King, Jr.’s funeral was on the black-and-white TV. I was not quite 7. I see my mother, a pretty redhead, doing the ironing in our house in Mankato, Minnesota. At one point she starts to cry – tears of sadness and anger. “What is going on in this country?” I remember her saying.

More than once, in our teens, my siblings and I came home from after-school sports practice expecting to sit down to dinner and instead found a hand-written sign stuck to the oven with a magnet: COOK ON STRIKE. If Mom felt the family was taking her for granted, and if we weren’t doing our housecleaning chores to boot, she’d take a stand.

My parents brought all five of their children – then age 9 to 14 – to the only large-scale anti-war protest in our town, in 1972. Picture a family of seven marching with the long-haired students from the local state university. Our living room in those years was adorned with a wall hanging my mother had found, which read: “War is not healthy for children and other living things.” Shirl opposed the Vietnam War for multiple reasons, but one was that she had three sons, the eldest of whom, my big brother, was at risk of being drafted had the conflict dragged on long enough. (It didn’t.) The political is personal, too.

Despite these anecdotes, my mom was not a persistent political activist or social justice warrior. She was, as the obit said, a searching spirit. The oldest child of working-class parents, raised in Iowa and Austin, Minn., she became the first in her family to go to college. As she raised her large brood, she finished her Bachelor’s degree and then got her M.S. in Psychology. She worked for many years as a high school guidance counselor; in that role, she was much more passionate about helping teens with their personal troubles than helping them choose a college or career path.

Her interest in mental health – and in all forms of personal well-being – was personal and urgent. Shirl worked hard at being happy but contentment didn’t come easy to her. She amassed thousands of books, their pages marked with paper clips and sticky notes. She had especially large collections on relationships and spirituality. As she read magazines and newspapers, she regularly clipped articles for her children based on our personal and professional interests.

Late in life, Shirl always said her greatest source of pride and satisfaction was her family. Any stranger she met would soon learn that she’d had five children in five years back in the day. (And yes, she conceded that it was difficult for her – having three at a time in diapers, for example.) Eventually she became a grandmother of 15 and the great-grandmother of 17. Borrowing from a hymn, she told her family: “All I ask of you is forever to remember me as loving you.”

She developed dementia in her eighties, so we lost the woman we’d known not all at once but gradually. When she still could, Shirl reflected on her life and her legacy and, characteristically, jotted notes. She hoped that the world was a better place for her having been here. Don’t ask me for an unbiased opinion on whether that’s the case.

Shirl was not a hero. She was entirely human. But as ancestors go, my mom was a good one.

*

A (very) few words about the assassination of Charlie Kirk. I’ll add my voice to the chorus condemning political violence. I will not sing along with those in the mainstream media praising Charlie Kirk. Ezra Klein in the New York Times claimed that Kirk was practicing politics “in exactly the right way,” showing up at campuses and talking with anyone who would talk to him. But did Kirk listen? Yes, he flung words and not bombs. But his words were often cruel and demeaning. He punched down. He used his giant megaphone to advance racism and other bigotries.

As of this writing, we don’t know who assassinated him or what they hoped to accomplish. But this act of murder will bring nothing good.

In one of my first installments of this newsletter after the inauguration of Trump II, I wrote about the danger of the U.S. descending from our state of cold civil war into something more horrific. In the hours after Kirk’s death, some called for lowering the temperature while others turned it up. Jesse Watters of Fox News and Steve Bannon declared that America is already at war. Predictably, Donald Trump, the Divider in Chief, lashed out at the “radical left” for rhetoric that “demonizes those with whom you disagree,” thereby, he said, inciting this kind of violence. This from a man who calls his political opponents “scum” and whipped up the mob that attacked the U.S. Capitol on January 6. Trump made no mention of the recent violent attacks on Democratic politicians in Pennsylvania and Minnesota.

But some on the left ought to choose their words more carefully, too. And their deeds. Each act of political violence, and every word celebrating or condoning it, pushes us closer to the abyss.

Scene on Radio the podcast is available wherever you get your shows, and at sceneonradio.org.