Dr Grace Manning-Orenstein, 1940-2026
Dear Friends,
If you are reading this, it is because you have had the great fortune to know our mom, one of the truly original humans on the planet. We are deeply sad to share that Grace passed away a week ago Monday in Berkeley, CA. She had advanced Parkinson's, which progressed slowly and then suddenly. We were with her for the last month, and although it has been coming for years, we did not expect it to be this fast.
Mom spent her last weeks peacefully in her bedroom of fifty years, with a view of the golden gate. We had calls with her sisters, and she got to hug some of her dearest friends - Katrina, Sue, Laurie and Jeanine. She also spoke of her late friend Daunne Price, our beloved neighbour growing up, as if they were planning a date. Jeff got to read to her and tell her about swimming the Cook Straight in New Zealand.
Jeff and I have been reflecting on what is most essential about our mom. Dr. Grace Manning Orenstein was entrepreneurial, intellectual, daring, goofy (she visited Jeff at college wearing a gorilla suit), loving, curious, good with her hands (thanks to her workbench in the basement we always associated women with power tools), impetuous, anti-authoritarian and totally non-compliant. Good luck trying to get her to park legally. Or to follow any rule. That drove our dad nuts. She loved a dirty martini, the movies (particularly Tom Cruise), the series 1883, the opera, children far and wide, a good party, her husband Moe and us. All of us.
Mom created adventures around her. She met our dad training for the Peace Corps in Malawi in 1962, wrote about climbing Kilimanjaro with him for The Atlantic, founded a Montessori School in a church basement in Oakland that was a foundation of our childhood (I was one of her first three students), filled our home with animals (hamsters, dogs, cats, rabbits, lizards, tarantulas, a rat, a California king snake named King Charles), went back to get her PhD in her fifties, started a therapy practice, then founded a nonprofit, The Link To Children, to bring mental health workers on site to work with at-risk kids in schools and family centers across the state of California.
In one of her moments of clarity in her last week, I did an inventory of mom's bedside books. They have piled up over time, like a projection of her mind's eye in the last decade: her nonlinear pursuit of ideas, wide-ranging imagination and unpredictable curiosity. There are works of journalism, books by friends, plays, erotica, Chomsky, Atwood, Du Bois, Steve Martin. The immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. The Constitution, and a dusty copy of the Bible. As I read the titles out loud, she declared Swann's Way "very disappointing" and gushed about The Joy of Mathematics ("delightful").
We will plan a celebration of Grace's life in the coming weeks, at a Berkeley, CA location to be determined soon, where we can laugh, sip martinis, and share stories of our mom, who dad called amazing Grace. We will be in touch once we have confirmed the details. We hope you will join us if you can.
Katie and Jeff
