Linda Gordon Obituary

Smart, fun, kind, and caring.

I miss her every day.

Aug 12, 2012
Still thinking of you.

// s

Aug 12, 2011 On the anniversary of your birthday Linda:

Do you realize that you have the most beautiful face
Do you realize we're floating in space
Do you realize that happiness makes you cry

Do you realize that everyone you know someday will die
And instead of saying all of your goodbyes
Let them know you realize that life goes fast
It's hard to make the good things last
You realize the sun don't go down
It's just an illusion caused by the world
spinning round

Love, Shannon

My Dear Friend,



It's been just over a year now since the day you left our earth, and each day I long for your friendship. I hope you found that there is meaning and purpose in spite of your contrary belief.



Your love still lingers here in the hearts of many including Raggs who waits to greet you with each ring of the bell.



You're still in the hearts of many.

To all of you who shared your hearts, your homes and your adventures with my Linda, thank you for being a part of her life. Her friends were the grounding force in her life, and were her surrogate family, even as she traveled the world over, seeking excitement, experiences, spirituality and just plain fun. I met Linda when my shoe got stuck in the mud in her backyard. Our parents had just bought new homes in a suburb outside of Chicago. I was 3 and she was 4. We’ve been friends ever since, and I will miss having Linda in my life forevermore. Her warm heart, unique spirit, optimistic outlook and knack for adventure are what so many of you are remembering about Linda. Hopefully you also know how important you, her friends, were in her life and what you meant to her because I know it’s what mattered most to Linda.

My heart breaks for Linda's family and her many friends

Never again will we stroll down the mall towards one of Linda's favorite stores to hear her shout "CANDY!"

Never again will her beauty blend

in with the fresh cut flowers from the Farmers Market

Never again will we search for the goofiest socks on the planet that look so perfect on her skinny ankles

Never again will we sip martinis listening to the Diamond man play great jazz at Jax

or receive our welcome home hugs from our good friend Mini at the West End

Breakfast at Dots

Coffee at Trident

You are in our hearts

We miss you

All I have to say is this: Dr. Gordon, really had an impact on my life. She was a very intelligent, loving and delightful person. I know she had a wonderful life because she appreciated the idea of living. I am happy I had the opportunity to learn from her.

I had the good fortune of working with Linda on her Literature project.

There was something unique about Linda. She was the type of person you wanted to have as a friend the moment you met her. Her kindness was overflowing and her laughter contagious.

They say that angels walk amoung us...Linda was definitly one of them!

Linda,
The pain of your loss will be exceeded by the joy of your memory.
Legions of friends in Chicago, Boulder, Ft. Lahdeedah, and Santa Feh.
A most generous spirit who found humor in any situation.
Exquisite taste with an eye for the fabulous.
Wearer of many hats, from black mortar board to pink hard hat.
Motorcycle racer and back country hiker.
Lover of sushi, saki, and double cream brie. Patron of the Greyhound.
World traveler and world literature.
A red pen marking none of these as sentences.
Linda was Culture. Linda was Fabulous.
I am so grateful for the time we shared.
My deepest sympathies to the family and friends who loved her.

Linda,
The pain of your loss will be exceeded by the joy of your memory.
Legions of friends in Chicago, Boulder, Ft. Lahdeedah, and Santa Feh.
A most generous spirit who found humor in any situation.
Exquisite taste with an eye for the fabulous.
Wearer of many hats, from black mortar board to pink hard hat.
Motorcycle racer and back country hiker.
Lover of sushi, saki, and double cream brie. Patron of the Greyhound.
World traveler and world literature.
A red pen marking none of these as sentences.
Linda was Culture. Linda was Fabulous.
I am so grateful for the time we shared.
My deepest sympathies to the family and friends who loved her.

I have thought of Linda about a hundred times a day since I learned this baffling, terrible news. She was witty, generous beyond belief, inspiring, and authentic. It will take me a good long while to figure out exactly what to say about this loss because I am certain it will reverberate for years to come. I feel sobered and dismayed, but take solace in the words of the ever-growing community of Fans of Lindago. What a wonderful person and life to be linked by! I, for one, feel honored.

Be well,

Linda lived a few doors up from us on West Manhattan, an unusually straight street for crooked old Santa Fe. West Manhattan leads up to the deserted Santa Fe Southern Rail Yards. The Rail Yards are about to be rehabilitated. Soon the neighborhood will be pricey, but right now it is teetering on the brink between being a pleasant middle class neighborhood and a lonely place through which others pass on their way to other places – to cut across from Aqua Fria to St Francis, to get to Borders and other Shops on Montezuma, to jog or walk their dogs in the rail yards, or just to wander up with their children to see the tourist trains come and go. The Rail Yards itself is an odd place. It has few tracks, is unpaved, and riddled with cavernous potholes that will take the springs out a car in a heartbeat if you drive across them at more than five miles an hour. Nevertheless, when you walk into the Yards from West Manhattan, the entire range of the Sangres opens out above you, snow dusted and ragged, and often capped with dramatic banner and lens clouds. In short, Manhattan Avenue was a place a newcomer might be ambivalent about, by turns interesting and inspiring and by turns a little desolate. Penny and I had been in Santa Fe a few weeks before we met Linda, and were beginning to feel like we might never make new friends here.



Linda loved the neighborhood and her enthusiasm healed our ambivalence. We met her out walking her dog, a soulful retired greyhound named, Rags. They were a wonderful pair, both thin as rails. If you ever saw Linda with Rags, you would know that you wanted to meet her. Rags had had a stroke and Linda was teaching him, a creature that had once run a kilometer in less than a minute, how to walk a few tentative steps on a level sidewalk. I love animals and talked to the Rags, while Penny and Linda struck up an animated conversation about books, and reading, and life in Santa Fe. We must have been quite the foursome on the street, an old guy with a bad leg bent over a crippled dog and two women, one very tall, the other petite, talking animatedly about books. Linda invited us over to see her house, a delightful “casita” with an inviting kitchen, a comfortable living room, and French doors leading out on a sunny back yard. This meeting led to our being invited to a book club that Linda and two friends had just started.



The fall came on. The weather turned first chilly and then, to everybody’s surprise damp and snowy. We saw Linda and Rags only occasionally. Despite the weather, Rags got better. He walked without assistance, and even showed tiny flashes of greyhound grace. In brief conversations with Linda, we learned snippets about her. That she was a construction supervisor! That she loved her job, and that she seemed to have found her place in the world doing that work. That she had helped build some of the familiar buildings around Santa Fe. That she had lived in Chicago and Florida. That she was bright, and curious, and principled, and interested in just about anything that had life in it.



The last time we saw Linda was at the December meeting of the book club. Only seven of us came and the conversation was desultory. To stir it up a little, I asked each person to say a few words about what had been the most interesting, notable, or important event that had happened in the intervening month. One person said he had started a new and exciting building project; another had just created a web page that displayed her art to great advantage, a third that he had found a new group of colleagues to work with, and so forth. When it came time for Linda to speak, she said that she had just gone to her high school reunion and was delighted at the new acquaintances she had met there and the old friendships she had renewed. She also told us that she had just sold her house in Florida and that she was eagerly looking forward to her life in Santa Fe and to her current construction project in Albuquerque. I asked her to say a few words about why the job was such a joy to her. She talked about the challenge of drawing on the strengths of all the people she worked with and navigating around their weaknesses in order to produce the best result for all concerned. I found myself wishing that our own daughter, Jessica, who has worked in hardhat industries for 20 years, could have had Linda for a boss.



No one can say how to understand such a terrible event. We can say the day was cold, the morning gray, and that a very little ice goes a very long way on impoverished New Mexico’s roads. But it helps me to know that this remarkable person died at a peak in her life, doing something she adored and was fabulous at, in a place to that she had come to think of as home.



Our thoughts are with Linda’s friends and family, wherever you may be in the world. Thank you for sending her to us. We are grateful for every moment we had with her.



Sincerely,

I saw Linda, and for that matter other schoolmates faces, for the first time since our early teens, last year at Bobfest 2003. Even though we were a year apart in school,Linda was a presence in those years and seeing the look of instant recognition and warmth and intelligence in her face brought it all back and had an anchoring effect upon me. It was like a big homecoming! The experience reminded me of the warmth and acceptance I felt in her presence so long ago. I believe that we remember certain others by the way they made us feel. And, I reckon many others have felt much the same way I did around her. All these things are how I will remember Linda-and especially that ever-present,warm and welcoming smile!

Linda and I were good friends growing up in Lincolnwood. We sat next to each other in 8th grade and had fun joking around. I recently re-connected with Linda by email prompted by the high school reunion. She was a happy, joyful person, so full of life. We had great fun catching up at the reunion. I know I will miss her and my deepest condolences goes out to the family--This is a true loss for us all.

I've only had the pleasure of knowing Linda over this past year. I'm sure my life will be ever changed by the grace, joy, knack for friendship and always optimistic outlook on life that Linda shared. I hope some day I can emulate just a fraction of her goodness. Linda, you will be missed by so many... with love and in light.

Who else would accompany me on 10-15 mile walks-in-training for the 60 mile Avon Breast Cancer 3-Day in sultry So. Fla.? Only Linda, who was my Hero. She had a gift for embracing everyone and making her feel special. In truth, she was special. We will so miss Lindago: her wide and generous spirit, her sparkling wit, her contagious sense of humor, her devotion to friends and her vigor for adventure.

kate and kandis

Dear Cerna, David, Michael and the rest of the Gordon/Saper/Block family, My condolences on the loss of Linda. I was just informed today of her untimely passing and was saddened to hear it. My deepest sympathy.



Love, Jaclyn Saper

When I first saw Linda, last summer, she was sitting and painting from the back of her pick up truck in a beautiful and wild place in Northern New Mexico. As I began to know her, I realized what a unique and extraordinary person she was. Her spirit shone so brightly that it is hard to believe that she is no longer here. I only knew her for a short while, and yet she touched me deeply..



My deepest sympathies to her family, what a tragic loss for all of us.

Linda's friends, who are all over the world, are devastated by the loss of this amazing woman. She was as spirited as she was brilliant, as creative as she was caring. Linda's wit and love of life enlivened us all. I is all but impossible even to imagine the world without her galloping through it, planning each new adventure. . . a big, beautiful smile on her face.



My heart goes out to her family in Chicago and Las Vegas, and to her friends in Santa Fe, Boulder, and here in Fort Lauderdale. She made her friendships with us a priority--and no one who knew Linda will ever forget her.

She was the most giving and wonderful, supportive friend to me, and to my late husband Paul, and to all of us whose lives she graced. She gave so much pleasure, wit, warmth and humor to us all. Take out your photos of all of the great times with her, everyone--seeing and remembering Linda will bring a smile to everyone, despite the enormous pain of losing her.



Lynn Wolf, in sadness and disbelief, yet rich with memories of Linda, a unique, wonderful woman.

Chicago, Boulder, Niwot, Longmont, Berthoud, Lincoln, Ft. Lauderdale, Los Alamos, Las Vegas, California, Italy, France and Australia; “Oh no’s” echo around the world. We will miss the joy of her laugh, the pleasure of her wit and her huge heart. Her capacity for friendship was enormous and all of us benefitted from it. We will miss her forever. Man of you are strangers, but we all share the sorrow of her loss and the joy of her remembered friendship.

Dearest Fli,

I'll see you in Belize.

Ba

Linda was a cousin who I saw two years ago for the first time in many years when she came to visit us with another cousin, Roberta and Roberta's daughter. We had a wonderful time spending the evening and getting to know each other again. Linda was a beautiful soul. Our sympathies and love to Cerna, Michael, and David and the rest of the Gordon/Saper/Block family. Love, Glenn Kadish and Jenny Heard.

For all of the family - it's a tragedy beyond words. May we know no more sorrow.

Sandy

Linda was a valued colleague of mine at Nova Southeastern University in Ft. Lauderdale. Having good colleagues is vital to college professors; Linda proved that to be the case on a daily basis as we worked together at Nova. I left Nova a couple of years before she did, but we kept in touch with email. It's very difficult to believe that her sparkle and her zest for life has left us. Our memory of her will improve our lives the rest of our days.

I deeply regret that I never had the pleasure of meeting Linda, but feel that I knew her through delightful and most affectionate word-portraits of her deftly drawn by my daughter Deirdre Fagan and son-in-law Bob Seltzer. I understand Linda was the first person aside from his parents to hold my new-born grandson Liam a litttle more than a year-and-a-half ago.She was a very special person who mattered enormously to these very special people in my life, and so I, too, keenly feel her loss.



Frank Fagan

Our sympathy for the loss of Linda, your lovely daughter, sister or family member. She was a great friend to our brother Bob Whitman. We will sorely miss her smile and loving friendship.

Of all the Souls that stand create ---

I have elected --- One ---

When Sense from Spirit --- files away ---

And Subterfuge --- is done ---

When that which is --- and that which was ---

Apart --- intrinsic --- stand ---

And this brief Drama in the Flesh ---

Is shifted --- like a Sand ---

When Figures show their royal Front ---

And Mists --- are carved away,

Behold the Atom --- I preferred ---

To all the lists of Clay! Emily Dickinson





We'll always love you, Leeeenda. You were our brightest light.



Bob, Deirdre, and Liam (21 mos.)

I am so sorry to hear about Linda. She stayed with me the night Bob Whitman passed on. May their souls meet again.