Her body gave up the struggle on Wednesday, July 18th, in the morning at her Mill Valley home. Her family, including sister Joan Baez, were at her nedside. But Mimi Fariña's soul will remain a component of the Bread & Roses musical fabric for decades.
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| Joan Baez eulogized her late sister Mimi Farina. A memorial service for Bread and Roses founder and folk singer Mimi Farina at Grace Cathedral. PAUL CHINN/S.F. CHRONICLE Source |
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| Holly Near, Judy Collins and Maria Muldaur sang "Bread and Roses" during the service. A memorial service for Bread and Roses founder and folk singer Mimi Farina at Grace Cathedral. Photo by Paul Chinns/SF Chronicle. Source: Judy Collins Fans facebook page |
After yesterday's memorial service for Mimi Farina at Grace Cathedral, when the crowd of 2,000 had filed outside and gathered in the sunshine of the courtyard to share their personal memories, men stood around swapping stories of how they'd fallen in love with her.
The year was 1964 or 1965, and novelist Tom Sanchez was sitting at the Big Sur hot springs, when "suddenly appeared this extraordinary apparition, a luminous creature." She reached down and lifted up a "small black cat, and picked it up to her face. There was all of this black hair flowing down around her and the cat, and I thought, 'Oh, I've met the woman of my dreams.' " And then Richard Farina (her husband at the time) appeared "and he said, 'Come on, baby, let's go.' "
Sanchez still sounded wistful. "I'm sure everybody has a story. You could put a book together: the first time I fell in love with Mimi Farina."
It was apparent from the service that affection and respect for Farina, who died July 18 at age 56, came in many forms. She was a well-known public person committed to a cause. Bread & Roses, the nonprofit foundation she founded in 1974, brings live entertainment to isolated audiences. The ceremony was in part a formal tribute from Farina's colleagues, who continue that work, and fellow musicians and entertainers who had participated over the years. Kris Kristofferson was there, as well as Marsha and Robin Williams, Don Novello, Paul Kantner and rock photographer Jim Marshall.
More painfully, the service reflected the piercing sense of loss for those closest, who had surrounded and supported her during the years of her illness. Her sister Joan Baez recalled the wit of dying Farina. "You know," she told Joan, "I think you're really much more involved in this than I am." Baez also spoke fondly of their sister Pauline, who calls herself "the other one," and acknowledged the knotted relationship between the two singing sisters.
Farina's partner of four years, Paul Liberatore, described her "achingly gorgeous singing voice" and said, "She could transform the simple act of walking into a room into a moment of exquisite beauty." And a friend, state Sen. John Burton, described conversations in which Farina (sibling of a famous older sister) and he (whose famous older brother was Rep. Phillip Burton) shared notes about being the little kid.
Fariña believed that to reach people, "you don't have to preach or say anything," said Lana Severn, former executive director of Bread & Roses. "You just have to be there and make music." So it was fitting that the plaintive sounds of the singers' voices soaring through the vaults of the cathedral's ceiling seemed the holiest presence at the ceremony. Judy Collins, Maria Muldaur, Holly Near, Boz Scaggs and Jackson Browne performed, the dramatic echoes eerily suggesting that Farina's spirit was near.
After Farina's death, she was dressed in the silvery gown she had worn to the 25th anniversary of Bread & Roses, as she had planned, and her body was placed in a casket decorated with roses painted on it by her sister Joan.
But she still seemed present at the service, which started when the cathedral was filled with the sound of her voice singing "Quiet Joys of Brotherhood," and concluded with peals of her laughter, recorded a few weeks before her death.
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| Mimi Fariña's service on August 7, 2001 at the Grace Cathedral, San Francisco. Following the service, she released a dove on the plaza in memory of Mimi who founded Bread & Roses in 1974. Photo by Marian Little Utley, Courtesy @marin_ij |
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Excerpts from eulogies for Mimi Farina [musical group] by Paul Liberatore [her partner]
"I'm Paul Liberatore, and for the past four years, I have had the honor, privilege, and great good fortune of being Mimi Farina's partner, soul mate, caregiver, lover, and friend.
"... of all the treatments over the past two years, the one that seemed to have done her the most good was dancing. Every week for as long as she was physically able, she attended Anna Halprin's Moving Toward Life class, using dance, drawing, visualization, poetry, and other arts in her courageous effort to heal. . . . Mimi and I had to deal with the terrible paradox of hoping for the best while preparing for the worst.
"After Mimi died, I found another piece of her artwork she'd done in her dance class and left for me ... a drawing of a bold dancer, a tall, proud, grand woman in a winged robe and long flowing hair, holding a feather to the heavens."
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| Artwork from Mimi to Mr. Paul - Photo from the Bread & Roses Newsletter Archives |
The drawing came with a poem she had written titled Follow Me. This is what it said:
Follow me
The wind, the eagle feather
Follow me
Met me lead
Dance the cancer
Relinquish the fear
The sky will twirl open
The sky will twirll open
The sky will twirl open
“Bread & Roses holds a special place in our hearts. We keep on giving because no one can argue with the power music has to open hearts and comfort minds.”
~ Tom Waits and Kathleen Brennan
Mimi died on July 18, 2001, at her home on Mt. Tamalpais in Mill Valley, California, surrounded by her family and close friends.
We remember Mimi Fariña – our founder and the light of Bread & Roses. We thank her for more than 25 years of devotion to our mission, to our audiences, and to those who traveled with her. We hold her banner high, promise that the love that she gave to others through Bread & Roses will be multiplied many times over in the years to come.
A public memorial and celebration of Mimi’s life was held at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco on August 7.”
I was also touched by the beautiful eulogy that was presented by Joan Baez, Mimi Farina’s sister, at Grace Cathedral San Francisco, CA–August 7, 2001.
Thank you for being here. I want to acknowledge some people.
I’d like to acknowledge my mother, who tackled Mimi’s illness in an extraordinary way by reading the right books – Jack Kornfield, Ram Dass, Rachel Naomi Remen, Stephen Levine, and Elizabeth Kubler Ross – and by practicing meditation.
I’d like to acknowledge my father, who prayed constantly and who spoke in Quaker Meeting to keep Mimi in the light.
I’d like to acknowledge my sister Pauline, who had made a point of staying out of the public eye for her whole life, but who somehow through the events with Mimi, became bolder and became much more of a sister to me. I thank her for that. Bold enough that one day, when I was dashing across the room with Bonnie Raitt, Pauline stepped forward and put her hand out and said, “Hi, I’m the other one.” And Bonnie knew exactly what that meant.
I’d like to acknowledge my son Gabriel, my niece Pearl, my nephew Nicholas, for being nearby and ready at the call for the last few weeks of Mimi’s life. They were lovely and they taught us about youth, about bravery, and about some kinds of wisdom.
I’d like to acknowledge Skipper as well. Skipper Henderson, my cousin, was there at the very beginning of Bread & Roses, and was here at the end of Mimi’s life for her during her whole illness.
Melita Figueroa cooked for us the last week, otherwise we probably all would have been dead. Thank you, Melita.
Gail Zermeno, a close friend of mine for many, many years, happens to be a nurse, and because of her, we never had to have an outside nurse come in, we never had to have anybody Mimi didn’t know touch her, be with her, and nurse her. Thank you, Gail.
Paul Liberatore, whose unconditional love for Mimi before, throughout, and after her illness and death humbled us all.
I’d like to acknowledge Final Passages, an organization which led us to many things including home funeral, which I think everybody should know about. It allowed us to, in fact, do everything ourselves. We did everything ourselves, from caring for Mimi, washing Mimi, clothing Mimi afterwards, doing all the things that she had asked us to do, and delivering her body to the mortuary ourselves in Paul’s truck.
I’d like to thank the prisoners and the people who are listening to this service live and remind you how much Mimi loved you and how much you meant to her, all of the people in the institutions who are listening today. Thank you.
And of course, I thank the staff of Grace Cathedral and Bread & Roses for today’s service.Just some words on Mimi’s death and dying process, and the gifts and lessons that I received.
My greatest lesson from Mimi, who has been in my psyche for 56 years: I had never seen her the way other people saw her. I’d seen her always as my little sister, and I discovered she was so much more. She was everything more. And I got a chance, through, I think it was the photos, seeing her looking like an Italian movie star, looking like a dancer, looking like an extremely strong woman and all of these things she was. It was the scale of Mimi’s stature and her greatness that I had never seen. It was a gift that Mimi gave us that she was around long enough for me to tell her, “Mimi, I didn’t get it, and I do now.” And sometimes I was thankful that Mimi couldn’t even answer back or she would have told me to be quiet, because I wanted to tell her how much I loved her, how much people loved her, how many people would grieve her death. She really didn’t like displays of emotion, and so we tried to keep ours down in her presence. One day I was on the telephone with her and I was looking over some of Jim Marshall’s early photographs, and I’d called Mimi and said “These are so beautiful, would you like to see any of them?” She said, “No, not really.” I burst into tears, and she asked me what I was crying about. I said I was crying because I loved her so much and because she was in pain and I couldn’t stand it. And she said, “You know, I think you’re really much more involved in this than I am.” I’m sure it was true.
I don’t know if you know the definition of a co-dependent… it’s somebody who at the moment of death, sees somebody else’s life pass before their eyes.
Lesson: I learned that Mimi needed her independence from me in order to love me, and I attempted to give her that. Mimi could and did handle her death and the rest of her life perfectly well by herself.
Gift: One day Mimi was very weak, she patted the bed for me to get in next to her. I crawled in and we put our arms around each other. And I sang, “I’m the luckiest sister….” She said, “…in the world.” And then she said, “Reality.” And I said “Yes.” She said, “There’s another reality, you know.” And I said, “Really? Have you seen it?” She said, “No. It’s a kind of an awareness, it’s a kind of intelligence.” And I said, “Is that where you’re going?” She said, “Yeah.” I said, “Do you need any help getting there?” She said, “No.” A little later, she said, “I want to go, I want to go now.” And I said, “Mimi, if it’s any help to you, I’m ready to let you go.” And she said, “No, you’re not.”
But I was, in fact, as ready as a woman brought up in the western world could be. I had done a vision quest in Colorado and I had spent two weeks in silent meditation at Spirit Rock, trying to let Mimi go. Trying to let Mimi go. I walked her trails on Mt. Tam and I would say out loud, “Let her go.” And I had a little prayer. I would turn to the mountains and the ocean and that fog which some days was blasting at me, and I would breathe in Mimi’s intimate companions, the hawk and the deer and the crow and the eucalyptus trees and the bay trees and the little brown birds, the lizards, the chipmunks, all of that beauty, and then I would turn and face Mimi’s house, and I would breathe out, “Mimi, I send you my warmth, I send you my strength, I send you all of my love, and may your passage be like a shadow crossing the moon when the time comes.”
Gifts: The coming together of the family in a way we really had never done before. Members of the family I didn’t know very well, I came to know. In members of the family I knew quite well, I discovered layers of wealth. The widening of the family circle to encompass Paul.
And I’ll leave you with a poem that I wrote after Mimi had died. It was the last poem I wrote.
If at storms endthe sun prances through your heart
as it does mine,then all the catastrophic moments of this life
will fade
past the here and now
to the trails of Tamalpais
where we walked
and where we will again find
the hearts calm,
the silent glade,
and a meeting place
for you and for me,
who came to know each other, finally.
Thank you.
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| Mt Tamalpais| Photo by Cristopher Markisz |
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