Gratitude: Magdalena Portmann

Today I went to the celebration of Magdalena Portmann's life. I wanted to wait for this before writing my gratitude post for Magdalena. I'm glad I did wait because the event was so lovely and gave me so much to think about. Thank you to Jackie Cassell and everyone who made it so special. 

I met Magdalena when I first came to Britain. She was school administrator in the School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences (COGS) and one of the first people who made me feel like I had a life in England. I cannot remember the details of my earliest encounters with her, but at some point Magdalena started inviting me to Pizza Express in Lewes on Friday nights, where various friends (some from COGS, some from elsewhere in Magdalena's life) would gather for a nice supper and lots and lots of talk. I was the odd one out, not living in Lewes, but it didn't feel like an effort to take the train in the opposite direction from home at the end of the week. It felt like sanctuary. 

Magdalena also created a sanctuary for Lewes Bonfire Night . She lived right in the centre of town and would put on some soup and invite any and all friends to use her flat as a stopping place and a gathering place and a calm place in the midst of the noise and the fire and the cold and the damp going on outside. I benefited from that a couple of times, and having experienced that special safe place, I have no desire to do Bonfire Night again without it. 

When Phil came into my life, I ended up going to Lewes Pizza Express less. Phil and I would go to see Magdalena perform in cabarets as part of Mandy and the Magdalenas, and when we got married we asked Magdalena to be one of the performers at our wedding reception. She did, and it was touching and warm, and I regret to say that we do not have a single photograph of it. (If anyone reads this and has a photo or video of Magdalena and her accordion at our wedding, please send me a copy.)

After Magdalena retired from Sussex, I saw her less, and after I became a parent and as Magdalena became more frail, it was even less, though we kept in touch online (her always insisting I needed some Alexander Technique) and still made the effort to see each other a few times a year. The pandemic did a number on that though, and so I'd only seen her once since Covid, when Phil and I went to visit her in April. Her physical world had got much smaller. She could just about reach her oxygen supply to a seat in the garden. But her mental world was still an incredible place to spend time beside, and she talked to us about the things she was learning through her illness—particularly about the value of accepting help and paying for services to keep one's quality of life high, to know when to give up on drudgery so as to preserve one's precious energies for friendship and for art.

Magdalena was an active listener and an engaging thinker. She was generous with ideas and advice (and anything else she had to give). She was impossibly glamorous—as someone at the memorial said, she cared about clothes, but not about fashion. She cared about beauty, and she found it in many places and made it happen in many others. And in my early days in England, Magdalena was a role model: someone to show me that it was possible to be a foreign (single) woman in this place. 

I took notes during the memorial speeches. 

One friend spoke of Magdalena's last months, of living while dying: "I don't know what this is," she said, "but I shall observe it." 

Another friend described Magdalena helping her with her bad back, teaching her to "do nothing in a careful sort of way," which sounded like a particularly good description of the Alexander Technique and generally great advice for many parts of life. 

The master of ceremonies sent us off with some thoughts about how the dead continue to live through our memories, but also with what I thought was a lovely description of how we deal with the loose ends and the regrets: "what can't be finished on Earth can be softly forgotten." Phil and I had been talking about going to see Magdalena in autumn, and we didn't get that chance. 

I like to think often about the lessons that people in my life have taught me. Many of Magdalena's lessons were just in the ways she comported herself. Such lessons are affecting, but subtle. But Magdalena also gave me some direct lessons, and I'll tell one that may seem trite, but has wrapped up in it thoughts about self-worth and beauty and sustainability. I was saying something at work about how I found dressing stressful because I had to keep in mind which outfits any particular group of students had seen last week, so that I didn't repeat myself too often. Magdalena thought this was wholly unnecessary stress—she said she just wore her clothes until they needed washing. Whether she wore the same clothes on consecutive days, I would not have known because she always just looked incredibly well put-together. I didn't always have the confidence to follow her wearing clothes on consecutive days—I worried that only someone with a beautiful frame for clothing (like her) could get away with it. But earlier this year, I made an announcement (to myself and a couple of others) that I was going to take my inspiration from Magdalena and wear my clothes until they needed a rest or a wash. I'm somehow pleased that I made that decision while she was still around. 

The pictures here are among the gifts given to people who attended today. Thank you to the people who made that happen, to the people who helped Magdalena as her illness progressed, and to Magdalena.