In Memoriam 1992-1997/Denise Fox

DENISE Fox

1931—1996 DEEPLY GRIEVED PASSING DEVOTED HANDMAIDEN

BAHA‘U’LLAH DENISE FOX. HER STALWART HEROIC PIONEER SERVICES WITH HER BELOVED HUSBAND AND CHILDREN IN BRITISH ISLES, ESPECIALLY IN ISLAND OF MULL, AND SUBSEQUENTLY IN BASQUE REGION OF FRANCE, IMPERISHABLY RECORDED ANNALS FAITH IN THOSE AREAS, CONSTITUTE SHINING EXAMPLE FUTURE GENERATIONS FRENCH AND BRIT[SH FOLLOWERS CAUSE GOD. CONVEY HEARTFELT SYMPATHY JEREMY

THE BAHA’I’ WORLD

FOX AND MEMBERS FAMILY. PRAYING HOLY SHRINES PROGRESS HER NOBLE SOUL ALL WORLDS GOD.

Universal House ofjustice July 4, 1996

D enise Girardo was born in Le Cannet, near Cannes, France, on June 21, 1931. Her mother, who declared her faith in Bahá’u’lla’h in 1983, was originally British, and her father, like so many from Céte d’Azur, was French, but his family was originally Italian.

Denise was brought up in Provence, with the exception of a difficult period during the war when the family moved to Toulouse and her mother went into hiding. Denise was subsequently transferred to a farm in the Pyrenees with the help of the Red Cross.

After school she worked for a while as a shop assistant on Promenade de la Croisette in Cannes. Later she went to London to discover the English side of her family. She stayed on to qualify as a nurse at Bolingbroke Hospital and then returned to France to work at the American Hospital, first in Nice and later in Paris. After a year and a half of nursing, she returned to England to qualify as a midwife at the Mill Road Maternity Hospital in Cambridge. Mahin (Tofigh) Humphrey taught her midwifery and the Faith.

We met at the firesides held at the Bahá’í Centre (4 Gonville Place), and she became a Bahá’í shortly after me, just in time for the Fast in 1961. We were married in 1962.

Just after our wedding Denise went short—time pioneering, sometimes referred to as “last—minute ditching” or “the Riḍván shuffle.” She went to Peterborough in 1962 and to Southport in 1963. We met briefly at the World Congress in London

where she was serving as a simultaneous

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Denise Fox

translator. Denise also served on the Spiritual Assembly of Cambridge before our departure for Swansea in 1964. A year later I had obtained my teachers diploma, and Swansea had become a goal town of the Nine Year Plan. The National Assembly asked us to stay on as pioneers. Swansea became one of the first Local Assemblies to be formed during that plan. Our first daughter, Nickie, was born in Swansea in 1964, followed by our son, Jago, in 1966. He died twenty months later after an accident and is buried near the Guardian’s grave in London.

In 1968, in consultation with the Pioneer Committee, I obtained a choice of teaching posts, one in Ghana and the other on the Isle of Mull in the Inner Hebrides. Denise had a preference for the Hebrides, and so we went there thinking it would be for three years. We stayed for twelve. Rhiannon, our second daughter, was born there in 1972, and the first Spiritual Assembly of Mull was formed in 1975. As a member of the Scottish Teaching

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Committee, Denise became known as my peripatetic wife. From 1978 she worked as a district nurse and midwife, probably the happiest time of her life, despite the poor health she suffered.

Conscious of her French origins and that we were both French speaking, we consulted with the British and French National Assemblies and set offin October 1980 for the Basque region with our two daughters and a tent. Flooded out of the camp site we hastily found our first flat in Saint Jean de Luz. One year later, and a lot poorer, Denise found a grueling, sixty hours a week night—duty job in a sanatorium in Cambo—les—Bains. Fortunately some while later a new law reduced the shift to thirty—nine hours while maintaining the same salary. From this time on her health deteriorated steadily until she died of cancer on July 1, 1996.

The funeral was a little short of a miracle, taking place as it did in the village of Sate, one of the bastions of traditional Basque culture and where, so recently, we encountered opposition to the presence ofa “foreign” Faith or sect, and the mayor forbade the participation of the Bahá’ís at a book exhibition where we had regularly had a stand over the past five years.

Our main difficulty was to find suitable premises for the funeral ceremony. The local curate would not let us use the lovely Chapel in our part of the village, and in the end the mayor lent us the youth hall, which was not obviously suitable, but the only real possibility, and Nickie and Rhiannon transformed it beyond recognition.

Over one hundred people were crowded into that inadequate hall, and without any direct explanation of the Faith, its depth and beauty were evident and felt by all in a way no formal or intellectual presentation could ever have done. Each person received a copy of the program. Never has Denise

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taught so many, so well, as the day she left us! It was the climax to a life of teaching by example.

jeremy Fox