30 Aug Jill Eicher 1963-2024
Jill Adrienne Eicher, my life partner of 25 years, died on Thursday evening due to complications of metastatic breast cancer. I held her hand and talked to her until she passed, though she was unconscious the entire time. Her sudden collapse surprised the hospice team. But they knew what they were seeing. Then the nurse took me aside and said, “She has only a few hours.”
So they left me alone with her and I did my best to let Jill know—through the morphine fog—that she wasn’t alone: “I’m here, Jilly, just like I promised. You can let go. I’ll catch you if you fall . . . .”
I first met Jill in an antiques consignment shop, where she was working—wrapping dishware in pages torn from The Chronicle of Higher Education. I said, “Who’s the academic?” Only grad students and professors read The Chronicle. She said she was working on her Ph.D. in Rhetoric. I said I was impressed. Almost immediately we started sparring verbally, she was so sassy. Energetic, sarcastic, ever-teasing. I would learn that she had just ended a 14-year relationship with a guy who couldn’t commit.
Commitment? Within six months I was ready to live with Jill. So ready that, at her urging, I bought a wrecked, former frat house. She promised to help me fix it up, never mind we knew nothing about DIY. Fifteen years later, we were long married and had made the house a Victorian showcase, so much so that articles about it appeared in media outlets from California to Connecticut.
When it came to DIY, I was big picture, Jill was details. Jill’s sense of design was much better than mine. She had an artist’s eye for color (she was an art minor as an undergrad). She laughed raucously when I said we should paint the walls white. Her motto was, “Do it once and do it right.” Sometimes my motto was, “Do it fast and get it done!” The learning curve for both of us was steep but certainly steeper for me. I can’t count how many fixes I had to re-do.
I’m stubborn but not intractable. This meant Jill had to be tough enough to make her case when we were at an impasse. To her credit, when she knew she was right (about a design or construction decision), she was like a terrier with a towel. Tough, tough, tough. She would not back down. And so, finally, I’d relent, often embarrassed by my stupidity.
For example, when I was about to run out to get our missing and fractured staircase spindles custom-turned at a woodshop, she grabbed me by the elbow and spun me around so that I could see the precise measurements she had calculated for each spindle. I gaped at the paper she held up to my face. “Remember?” she said. “Each spindle is a different length. You were about to spend over a thousand dollars on spindles that would not have fit our baluster!”
If you’ve met Jill, you saw three things immediately:
1) She had no agenda, no attitude, no judgment: she accepted people at face value and was never motivated to censure, change, or critique anybody.
2) She was thoroughly empathetic—warm and caring, eager to listen, ready to learn, at ease with everyone she met.
3) She was fun and funny. She so enjoyed a good time, always looking for the punchline in a conversation (if the conversation warranted levity, that is), ready to play a game (she loved games and puzzles), teasing out the fun every day in surprising ways.
To do her justice, I must also touch on Jill’s private side, which nearly nobody knows about: she battled severe depression all of her adult life. When she went down emotionally, it was hard to get her back. She’d been assaulted in college and, as a result, suffered from PTSD, often waking with a start in the middle of the night. Nightmares regularly burdened her dreams.
The pain she bore privately informed the deep commitment she’d made to helping others, first as a stellar college teacher, then as a social worker, helping the homeless in Baltimore and then the addicted in Carroll County. If you were in trouble, Jill’s the one you’d want to see. She was a wicked-good researcher and an outstanding writer, the combination of which allowed her to win the funds and medical help her clients most needed.
One of the many things I admired about Jill was her sense of adventure. The girl was bold. She and I used to break into abandoned or condemned historic houses just to scope them out—and one time were nearly arrested for doing so. When she visited me in Micronesia, she insisted on snorkeling in a remote lagoon, oblivious to the dangers I had cautioned her about, not the least of which was sharks. When we were traveling out west, she drove me (in our camper van) over steep, rutted dirt roads up a mountain (no guard rails on that road and lots of cliffs) because she wanted to see a ghost town . In short, she was always willing to go for it.
Consider: just when we were well settled in our grand Victorian brownstone, loving our historic neighborhood, and thoroughly acclimated to city life, I declared that we should buy a decrepit farm. And she said, Yes. I see now that she wasn’t ready for such a leap. But leap she did.
She was protective of me, believed I worked too hard, and was convinced that I’d come to a tragic end somehow because (she said) I was always looking to the horizon instead of at the ground. That’s why I was regularly stepping in dog doody in the yard—which she never did. I gave her lots to laugh about.
Towards the end, when Jill was filled with regret about her early demise, I told her that we’d had a good run, we’d done some cool and remarkable things—the product of two dynamic and creative minds that worked so well together. And this: you made a difference, Jill, you touched lives, gave them hope and love, letting them know that they were worthy of your care and concern. No regrets, my sweet, you carried your torch high and for that–and so much more–I love you.
