Noël Brusman was an avid smoker. She loved cigarettes. But the 1963 Surgeon General’s Report put an end to that. Brusman quit through “sheer willpower,” promising to pick up the vice again on her deathbed.
But when that sad time came last month, Brusman forgot her promise. She did, however, ask for gin, and Marvin, her husband of 43 years, served her Beefeater on ice, with lime and tonic, in a Wonder Woman sippy cup.
Brusman’s death last Dec. 11, two weeks before her 93rd birthday, was not noted in the newspapers. The media likes to pile on, gilding the lily. Those “The Lives They Lived” retrospectives last week celebrating, yet again, the familiar accomplishments of Tina Turner, Rosalynn Carter and their ilk. Just in case you forgot.
About the same time as those were appearing, I received an email from Brusman’s daughter-in-law.
“Years ago, you wrote of U.S. Air Force soldiers on a peacekeeping mission who gave away Beanie Babies to Afghan children,” began Patti Naisbitt, referring to a story written 17 years ago. “Noël Brusman, mother of one of the soldiers, was tireless in her efforts to collect and ship beanie babies. You talked with Noël for that story ... she had a lot to offer.”
That she did.
”She was a grassroots activist, always working to make her community a better place,” wrote Nana Naisbitt, Brusman’s daughter. “Noël had a myriad of interests, but preferred to address big challenges like racial inequality in the Chicago schools, adding sex education to Chicago school curriculums, and fighting for teachers’ rights, even while raising five children.”
She was no cosseted do-gooder, advocating causes from the chaise of ease. Life served Brusman up curveballs. Breast cancer, twice, at age 37 and 54, because once wasn’t enough, apparently. Her first husband, John, abandoned her and their five children in the spring of 1975. So she found “the love of her life” in an unexpected place: divorce court, marrying her attorney, Marvin Brusman, in 1980.
Brusman’s life is a reminder of just how close we are to the rigid, patriarchal society that many would drag us back to, kicking and screaming. The 1974 Equal Credit Opportunity Act allowed American women to obtain credit cards in their own names, for the first time. But Brusman had to fight to get hers, along with the mortgage on a modest third-floor walk-up condo near the University of Chicago.
She worked for 24 years at Evergreen Park High School, mostly as a teacher of troubled youth, and as chairman of the Department of Special Education.
When the steps of the condo became difficult, the couple moved to Woodbridge in 2013 to be closer to her son John and his wife, Patti, and their two children.
Brusman had ginger. When I told her daughter-in-law that I would indeed be writing about her, she replied: “Noël would have been quite delighted with the notion that you would write about her. Then she would have offered you some very specific and interesting directions.” I started to type, “Then it’s a good thing she isn’t here...” but realized I was addressing the newly bereaved, and hit the delete bar, a valuable skill.
As an old lady, Brusman maintained that essential “flirty fun spark,” according to her nephew Scott Maxwell. Even in hospice care at Good Samaritan Hospital, banged up badly and in pain from a hard fall in early spring 2022, “she made all the nurses laugh,” wrote Nana Naisbitt.
“Two weeks before she died, she rallied for a week, getting out of bed every day to sit at the dining room table and enjoy a small meal. Her home hospice nurse, a young man named Sam, said upon her rally that she looked radiant. She glowed beautifully with her white hair pulled taut like a ballerina and her lips painted red. When he asked if she wanted to make it to her 93rd birthday, she answered in her typical dry wit, ‘I’d prefer 94.’”
Brusman and I belong to generations who believe that having your life story in the newspaper conveys a sort of significance — albeit fleeting. But what significance isn’t? The pyramids will be dust one day, too. Besides, life isn’t about passing renown. Seeing how someone like Noël Brusman lived, fully yet under the radar, reminds those of us who are still here, and still have time, to do with ours all we can, while we can.
