CINDY LANGE-KUBICK / Lincoln Journal Star | Posted: Friday, December 10, 2004 6:00 pm
On tables covered with white linens and blue flowers, mourners took nourishment from the prairie Friday.
They ate sweet cornmeal "thrasher cups" and silky buttermilk bars, plums and rhubarb, the simple foods Willa Cather described in her novels.
"Come into Cather's Kitchen," said Jim Rosowski, welcoming the hundreds who had gathered at Saint Paul United Methodist Church to celebrate the life of his wife of 41 years.
Sue Rosowski, the nation's preeminent Cather scholar, died Nov. 2. She was 62.
Before the meal, a succession of friends, former students and colleagues stood at the pulpit of the spacious sanctuary to celebrate a life well-lived.
"Jim asked me to talk about what Sue really cared about," University of Nebraska-Lincoln colleague Hilda Raz told those assembled.
"That's an easy one. She cared about us."
For more than an hour they talked about that care. Remembering Rosowski for both her prodigious scholarship and her unwavering commitment to others.
"Can we ever express the depth of our admiration and love for Susan Rosowski?" asked fellow English Professor Maureen Honey. "She was the epitome of a teacher-scholar, a mentor and a pillar of our community."
Some spoke of her words, words that pushed them to pursue or continue careers as scholars.
"I remember her praise and encouragement," said Richard Harris, director of Humanities at the Webb Institute in New York.
The two met at a seminar in 1987 and Rosowski praised a paper Harris had written on Cather.
"Her gift of sympathy' changed the course of my whole academic career," he said.
They spoke of Rosowski's love for her family, her parents, her husband, her sons, Scott and David, her granddaughters, Emma and Grace.
Many quoted Cather in their remarks.
"She was one of ours,'" Honey said of Rosowski, drawing from the title of Cather's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel.
She was like Antonia, said Ann Romines from Georgetown University.
"She had that something which fires the imagination, could still stop one's breath for a moment by a look or a gesture that somehow revealed meaning in common things."
Romines painted pictures of a strong woman, a woman leaning forward to speak or listen, her face glowing, welcoming friends to her home.
"We celebrate the bountiful harvest of Sue Rosowski's life: a living community in which scholarship and love and friendship and hard, fruitful work will continue to flourish."
University of Nebraska President J.B. Milliken was among the many from the university community who attended the service.
"I've admired her from afar for a long time," he said after the memorial service. "She was one of the real treasures of the University of Nebraska."
The Plymouth Brass played the postlude, entering the sanctuary with a soulful rendition of a "Just a Closer Walk with Thee," and exiting triumphantly with "When the Saints Come Marching In."
Before the service, Jim Rosowski shared an entry from his wife's diary.
She was diagnosed with cancer as a young woman and lost an eye as a result. In 2001, the cancer re-surfaced.
"What is it to know when you are young (say 30) that you are programmed for death by cancer, and then to grow up with this knowledge?" she wrote during a six-week hospital stay earlier this year.
"At 61 years old, I'm writing about living with cancer, first as a shadow presence, and now as a companion. Hearing a diagnosis of cancer is a paradigm shift at any age.
"At 31 it freed me into living; and (I hope) at 61, it is freeing me into dying."
Reach Cindy Lange-Kubick at 473-7218 or clangekubick@journalstar.com.