Liliane McLaughlin Praised By President Clinton

Liliane Emma McLaughlin died very peacefully on June 2, 2009, days after suffering a massive stroke. She was born in Antwerp, Belgium, in 1931, of strict Seventh Day Adventist parents, Armand Drogemuller, a self-made textile wholesaler, and his wife Emma, from the bourgeois Leroy family. Liliane had two brothers, Guido, 11 years her junior, and Roland, 15 years younger, who survive her.

The family did not suffer too badly during the German occupation thanks to Armand's bartering his under-the-counter stock of warm underwear. But their house was bombed, leaving Liliane with a lifelong terror of sudden loud noise.

When she expressed an interest in playing the piano, she was sent to the Royal Flemish Conservatoire. Hours and hours of daily practice not only made her a powerful musician, they also gave her indomitable strength of will. She became a Laureate of the Conservatoire, but a career as a concert pianist was precluded by Sabbath Day observance. And, because she was a woman, nobody thought of giving her high intelligence the university training it deserved. So, after acquiring an exquisite command of etiquette at a finishing school, Liliane merely slaved in her father's business.

Early in 1957 the family was gathered in their imposing house, formerly owned by a baron, when Armand astounded them by asking if they would like to live in California. Everyone declared that that was a great idea. However, Liliane had second thoughts when she was deputed to be the first to go, so that she could scout out that foreign land with the teenage Guido in tow. Luckily English was Liliane’s third language. In addition to her native Flemish she also spoke French and German.

Adventist connections found her a job in the nutrition department of the Glendale Sanitarium and Hospital. That enabled her to obtain an apartment, which she immediately furnished with a Baldwin baby grand piano, purchased on the installment plan.

Six months later, Armand and Emma arrived with Roland, and they all settled into a house on Glenoaks Boulevard, a few hundred yards from the hospital. Within two years, Liliane was working as an x-ray technician. She also became certified in radiation therapy, nuclear medicine and ultrasound – a range of expertise unheard of these days. Later she became an assistant lecturer in radiology at Loma Linda University.

Liliane spent a year of her training in Toronto. One Canadian winter was enough to make her decide, when we got married, that she would not come to my Toronto home, but that I should move south to enjoy the fresh air and pure water of the LA basin. Liliane was soon promoted to be a chief technologist, caring for cancer patients. She cared for them so deeply that she imperiled her own mental health. To keep sane she traveled abroad as often as possible. Twice, she even went on six-month bouts of world travel. She also climbed to the 14,505-feet summit of Mount Whitney.

Liliane with Wolfgang Wagner, grandson of Richard Wagner, who ran the Bayreuth Wagner Festival.

Even though the hospital, renamed the Glendale Adventist Medical Center, paid her the most meager of salaries until late in her career, she saved enough for her travels by raising frugality to a fine art. Liliane did not seek to become head of the radiology department because she did not relish the prospect of repeatedly confronting the hospital administrators, who had hardly any of the managerial skills their successors now demonstrate.

However, she played a major role in running the department, and steered her colleagues away from trouble during many Joint Commission inspections. Later she became the first Manager of the hospital’s Cancer Center, and the Radiation Safety Officer.

In 1997 she received a letter signed by President Bill Clinton which said: “Dear Liliane, I am delighted to commend you for your 40 years of dedicated service at the Glendale Adventist Medical Center… Your steadfast devotion serves as an example of caring and leadership to which we can all aspire.” Because her caring nature touched their hearts, nearly all who met Liliane cared for her.

Sadly, Armand, unable to repeat the success of his early career, took out his frustration by deserting his wife. Liliane promptly invested in a triplex, and provided her mother Emma with an apartment next to her own. She also began taking Emma on her travels.

On one of their vacations, Liliane met me in Tahiti. During a delightful 10-year-long midlife crisis, I had traveled widely, but this was my first time with a tour group. Shocked to find that that meant a mobile geriatric ward, I rushed to the side of this youthful blonde, and made an instant hit – with her mother. Honestly, I had no idea that Emma was aged 71 when I told her “I can't bear to be with all those creaking septuagenarians.”

Liliane and I used to go jogging together before breakfast – she must have cast a spell, because normally nothing would have induced me to get up early, let alone take needless exercise. Anyhow, after we spent two weeks together, I told her she would make a perfect companion for a trip I was planning. We would go to the Himalayan state of Sikkim, to witness the total eclipse of the Sun, early in the next year, 1980. Back home in Canada, it struck me that Liliane would make a perfect companion, period. So on New Year's Eve I telephoned to ask "Will you marry me?" Without a pause she replied "Yes."

Liliane and I took each other on trust. My boss hit the nail on the head when he said "Harry, if you've got five minutes to spare, tell me everything you know about Liliane." It might seem odd for a devout Seventh-day Adventist to marry a non-Christian who does not even believe in a personal God. But we had the same ethical standards, and one of the reasons I so greatly admired Liliane was that she was such a good Adventist.

She lived her religion – she didn’t advertise her piety, she didn’t try to convert others, and she despised the hypocrisy of some who did. Liliane simply lived her religion, but, like Jesus, she had the grace to deviate from a religious practice if it would disconcert someone who did not share her faith.

The marriage worked because we respected each other’s ideas, though this had strange effects on our thinking. Because she so much wanted to keep an eye on me on resurrection day, I abandoned my intense desire to give my body for research. So I shall be buried in her grave, and I will be eternally delighted, if I awake to find my doubts disproved.

Bewilderingly, Liliane not only believed in both biblical accounts of the creation of Adam and Eve, she also accepted the scientific evidence for the Big Bang 13 billion years ago, and for the evolution of Adam and Eve. Liliane even had her DNA analyzed to trace her descent from mitochondrial Eve who lived 150,000 years ago. “It’s all such a puzzle”, she sometimes said, adding “but I don’t have to solve it.”

For a quarter of a century we indulged our hobby of adventure travel, with trips to more than 100 countries, including treks in the Himalayas, African safaris, walking tours of Japan, and cruising the Antarctic.

We are pictured above with our late friend Tenzing Norgay, the Sherpa conqueror of Mount Everest, and his wife Daku, in 1983 at their home in Darjeeling, India. She guided us on a trek through Sikkim and Bhutan while Tenzing led another group — all of whom became sick except for one lady who drank only beer. But we stayed fit because Daku saw to it that every drop of water was boiled, even though it takes forever above 15,000 feet.

Liliane was a passionate theatergoer devoted to Wagner’s Ring operas, especially the productions we saw in Wagner's own opera house in Bayreuth. In 2006 we spent a week at Costa Mesa to attend the Russian Kirov company's Ring. On the red carpet going to the reception at the just-opened Segerstrom Concert Hall we stopped to pose with members of the opera company for the photo below.

Liliane was an avid reader. Even at exhibitions she read every label. I shared her enthusiasms, but for me the greatest joy was just being at home with Liliane: she made our house into the home I always wanted. Alas, I could not be the companion she always wanted, one with whom she could play her beloved Beethoven and Chopin four-handed. I just listened enchanted, while she made the works of long-dead composers resonate with life.

In the second year of our marriage, I took Liliane and her mother on vacation into Navaho country. Within hours of our arrival, Emma was screaming with pain. Her already weak aorta was rupturing. We had not been warned that this could happen at high elevations due to the reduced atmospheric pressure The local Indian health center was unable to cope, so Emma had to be airlifted out. Liliane and I raced by car through the night to the hospital in Albuquerque, only to find that Emma had died while in the air.

In 1984 Liliane’s father developed stomach cancer. Despite her disgust at his heartless treatment of her mother, Liliane took him into our home for his last six months, and nursed him – in the very same room where she died.

Liliane’s own multitude of medical miseries started in 1987. Five months after she began reporting symptoms, what had been diagnosed as anemia was finally recognized to be colon cancer, by then so advanced that she had a 95 per cent likelihood of dying in six months. Fortunately the doctors loved her; so they pulled out all the stops and saved her life.

Part of the treatment was radiation, equivalent to what victims receive a mile away from an atom bomb explosion. The dose so ravaged her small intestine that it had to be entirely removed six years ago. After a year, during which her weight went down from 174 pounds to 95, doctors decided to pump nutrients into her vein. The line through which she was fed became needlessly infected – twice. The second infection was so serious that she was expected to die. She pulled through, largely to please me, and very grateful I am for the past three years, though I was saddened every day to see her in pain.

Liliane is memorialized at Glendale Community College, to which I have donated her Baldwin piano. Her name will also long be honored at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, because we relieved ourselves of responsibility for guarding our only valuable possession, by giving an elegant French nineteenth-century writing desk full of secret drawers. To see it click here.

Liliane was horrified by all the cruelty and fighting and misery in the world. She herself was badly treated again and again. But she never complained, and always showed everyone a friendly face with a sunny smile and a gurgling laugh. How did she manage it?

Her simple secret might amaze you. When she was a child Liliane read Pollyanna, a novel by Eliot Porter. Pollyanna’s father found that, in verses that say “rejoice” or “shout for joy” or “be glad,” the Bible tells us more than 800 times to be glad. So he invented the “glad game,” the object of which is to find something to be glad about in everything. The harder it is to find something to be glad about, the more fun the game. Like Pollyanna, Liliane decided that she would always play the glad game. And that's what she did until her dying days.

                                                                      

To see Liliane's genealogy and family emblem click here.