Story 01: The End
In order to begin this journey, we need to start at the end.
Obituary Published in The Boston Globe on July 21, 2008 by Bryan Marquard
Carrie Izard Richardson once wrote that her columns in the Boston Globe allowed her to be “a surveyor of the west suburban landscape,” mapping a terrain where issues that drive national conversations jockeyed for space with the commonplace.
Those dispatches from a cluttered desk in her Waltham home also formed an autobiography in chapters of fewer than 800 words. Using anecdotes from her roles as a mother and a daughter, a wife and a writer, she examined triumphs and setbacks – the giddy joy and the numbing grief of her life in the 1990s.
Of the challenges and endless wonders that came with raising her two daughters, she wrote in 1994: “How could I possibly have fantasized the level of emotion that would spring from the first step, the first loose tooth, the first report card, the first crush on a boy, the first tentative questions about life or the first favor asked of me that I can never grant: `Mom, when you die, will you become a star so I can wish on you and make you alive again?”‘
Mrs. Richardson, whose columns appeared in the Globe’s West Weekly edition, died July 10 in Newton-Wellesley Hospital. She was 52 and was diagnosed with a brain tumor.
With her husband, David, she bought a house in Waltham 21 years ago. As with many young couples starting a family, they envisioned that first home as a stepping stone to more affluent suburbs. Instead, she found a community that nourished her family’s life and her writer’s imagination.
When the Richardsons moved in 1996, they settled in a larger Waltham house, five minutes away from the first. It was, she wrote, “a place into which you can pour your dreams.”
So were her columns, which Mrs. Richardson filled with dreams realized and a few that were dashed.
There was the joy of seeing her daughters grow and watching them twirl during the father and daughter square dance sponsored by Waltham’s Daisy and Brownie Girl Scouts. “A father is, after all, the first man in our lives, often our first sweetheart and first Valentine,” she wrote in 1994.
And there was the fulfillment of writing, of contemplating through the lens of a suburban columnist issues as varied as terrorism and turkey hunting, the death penalty and the death of Princess Diana. Some columns inevitably elicited criticism, but many more drew praise. “I can’t tell you how many times I have read your kind words with tears in my eyes,” she wrote in 1998 of the e-mail she received from readers.
Though she became a prominent voice of Boston’s western suburbs, she grew up in Arizona, a self-described “desert rat” who fell in love with New England’s autumn beauty as an adult.
“I wasn’t just born in Tucson,” she wrote in 1996. “I grew up and eventually learned to parallel park my whole universe between the mountains surrounding that city.”
Then her father’s work took the family to Canton, Ill., for her senior year in high school. At 17, she was hired as a reporter – “my lifelong dream” – by the local newspaper.
“I was lucky,” she wrote in 1995. “The Daily Ledger was desperate.” Other newspaper and magazine jobs followed, and she graduated with bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the University of Illinois.
While working at a software company in the Boston area she met David Richardson, who proposed one clear February night.
“Without pause, I accepted,” she wrote in 1999. “Not just because I loved him, but because it was so obvious he saw me. He saw the eccentric, flawed, self-conscious, freckle-faced, scatter-brained-but-determined dreamer with a passion for writing – and didn’t flinch.”
They married in 1984, and he recalled that when they met “she was just very independent and afraid of nothing, full of life. She had done so many things in terms of sharing her life with others and to help good causes, either through the church or the community. We just sort of connected.”
Even as Mrs. Richardson sprinkled her columns with images of a house bursting with life in the form of her two daughters, Alysis and Lindsey, who both live in Waltham, she never averted her gaze from somber topics.
She wrote of the tears she shed when her brother David Izard died at 26 after an epileptic seizure, and when her grandmother Leona Wilhelmina Swanson died three years later at 92.
Holding her brother’s watch became a way to keep him close. And with a novelist’s eye for detail, she wrote in 1995: “Grandma had a habit of folding the foil wrappers of chocolate Hershey’s Kisses and putting them away in her drawer, as if checking the foil later would recall the pleasure. The last of those wrappers is now taped to my mother’s refrigerator; perhaps seeing it brings back, for my Mom, the sweet memory of her own mother, if only for a moment.”
Mrs. Richardson believed that being a mother to Alysis and Lindsey ultimately would free her from mortal constraints.
“Only with my children can I traverse the outer edges of the universe and land feet first on a colored hopscotch square,” she wrote in 1994. “With my children, everything is still on the horizon, even if theirs is farther away than my own. With my children, I have wings and am never earthbound.”
