EULOGY FOR HAYWARD

I last saw Prof. Alker (I could never call him by his first name) a few months before he was to leave to sing in Italy with his chorale. I had gone to Santa Monica to have lunch with Ann and had driven her back home after that. I had meant to drop her off and quickly leave, when Hayward high jacked me at their doorstep to talk about their upcoming trip. As he described how he was going to sing in San Marco’s Cathedral in Venice, his eyes glimmered with excitement. I remember telling Ann he sounded like a child, full of awe and amazement for life and beauty. I also remember thinking I would like to invite his chorale to sing at my church.

When I went to his memorial at USC, a colleague described him as bouncing off the walls with excitement when sharing the news of an award that I had won at the ISA meeting in 2007. And I remember that he and Ann had called me from their cell phone to give me the news. At the time, Ann was president of the ISA, so as soon as she gave me the news, off she had to be to another meeting. So Hayward stayed on the phone and gave me an account of what had happened at the FTGS meeting where my award was announced.

He was so concerned that Ann herself should be able to personally hand me the award certificate and the check that he practically snatched them away from a friend who had offered to accept the award on my behalf. He was happy and proud of me as a student of Ann’s. He cared for Ann’s students as for his own; he felt committed to us as he was to his own students. And committed he was! In the midst of a difficult year that had forced me to temporarily abandon my dissertation to fight a battle against cancer, he knew that award would tell me what he had told me many times before: that I had some worth as a scholar, that I had to fight the battle and get back to work, that I had something important to say. And he felt that reminding a student of her own worth was important and exciting.

When I learned about his death, I remember thinking I had lost the opportunity to hear him sing with his chorale. I remember thinking I would never hear his voice. At his memorial at USC, as I listened to student after student mourning their loss but also celebrating what he had meant to them, I realized I had been wrong. His song remains with us. All we have to do is join him in his singing. We might not have his tenor voice, but he taught us that what we have is both good enough and worth the work it takes to make it better.

- Catia Confortini -