Jill Diane Schabel

Jill Diane Schabel Custer - Jill Diane (Severson) Schabel

b. August 7, 1946

d. June 1, 2023

Jill is preceded in death by her cherished brother, Eric Walker Severson, her father, Eldon Berve Severson, and her mother, Kathleen Lenore (Eisley) Severson. Also Christopher Reeve and Patrick Swayze. She is survived by her husband of fifty-four years, Hans, her six children, (three human: Matthias, Alex, and Sabine, and three equine: Rehlein, Romeo, and Figaro), and seven grandchildren (Maia, Jana, Anna, Luca, Otto, Reece, and Wolfgang, all mostly human), along with her beloved sister-in-law, Bonnie, and eleven nieces and nephews. Also Harrison Ford and Robert Redford. In a characteristically kind and practical gesture, she chose to pass away on the same day as her mother (which was also Kathleen's birthday), greatly simplifying the process of remembering important dates for the still living.

Jill was born in Detroit, Michigan at the vanguard of the Baby Boom to a future career Air Force officer who, after being shot down in his B-17 "Zoomeriago" over Merseburg, spent the waning months of World War II vacationing at the Stalagluft III prisoner-of-war resort, and a mother who was an aspiring chemist. Her childhood, involving much peregrination between military bases in far flung places like California, Colorado, South Dakota, Texas, Newfoundland, and Germany, left her with a schizophrenic mix of change aversion and wanderlust. Her time at Albert-Ludwigs-Universitat in Freiburg, where she met her future husband, was a formative experience for her. While there, she immersed herself in the agreeable social, cultural, and viticultural climate, and mastered the German language to a level of fluency rarely attained by non-native speakers. For a foreigner to earn the a bachelor's degree majoring in German as she did from this highly-regarded university was an exceptional accomplishment. She also developed a lifelong affection for Hans' five brothers (Michael "the beautiful one", Thomas "the altar boy", Martin "the artist", and "the twins" Ingo and Andreas) as well as their families. It was reputedly after a long day of ski-touring in the Black Forest, when she was too exhausted to put up a defense, that her first child was conceived. Despite being distracted by maternal duties and a husband deep in the throes of his Ph.D. studies at Duke, she managed to obtain her master's degree in German from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and gained acceptance to the Ph.D. program at the University of British Columbia.

An exceptionally loving, kind, and sarcastic mother, and a devoted and loyal friend, she enthusiastically espoused the "Dust If You Must" (she mustn't), "anything is good enough for my family" theory of housekeeping. Being fully cognizant of Erma Bombeck's assessment that "housework can kill you if done right," she kept her exposure to an absolute minimum. Her parenting style epitomized the 1970s and 1980s attitude that eventually morphed into our first Boomer president's "don't ask, don't tell" policy. During the early phase of parenthood, when she and Hans "didn't have a pot to pee in" and lived in a dilapidated apartment complex across the street from SPASH, overrun with college students, she was generally oblivious to youthful hijinks, preferring to spend her afternoons watching General Hospital and All My Children, smoking and drinking wine with her friends. Vicks VapoRub was her go-to cure-all remedy for the myriad ailments of childhood, ideally to be liberally slathered on the most ticklish part of one's upper chest at the first sign of a cold.

Her fleeting and unenthusiastic attempts to play the role of disciplinarian were almost uniformly failures, quickly superseded by her preferred role of family "marshmallow." A notable exception was one occasion when her eldest son attempted to make it from one end of the apartment parking lot to the other by jumping from car hood to car hood, only to be foiled by an irate busybody with a new Corvette Stingray. On that occasion, she might have broken a wooden spoon on said son's posterior. With time she either mellowed or ran out of wooden spoons and was generally much easier on her younger children. She just rolled her eyes when Alex drove through a chain link fence while working as a soccer ref and was moderately supportive of Sabine's brief career as a performance artist. Without her frequent intercessions on the behalf of her children, they would have slept in and played much less, and partaken of the simple pleasures of brush clearing, wood hauling, garden weeding, and other forms of indentured servitude much more. For that, they are all extremely grateful.

To claim that she was no great lover of the quiet charm of Wisconsin winters is like saying housecats are ambivalent toward ice water immersion. She would insist that her seasonal affective disorder began in August with a gnawing sense of impending dread at the dwindling days and only ended in June when she could be reasonably certain that the last hard freeze had passed, leaving her with July to revel in the fleeting beauty of summer. Hygge, that twee Scandinavian term embracing the cozy conviviality of curling up with a book by the fire, was, in her mind, putting lipstick on the pig of February's irredeemable bleakness. Jill's keen observations of the humor and absurdity of everyday life and her trademark acerbic wit made the arrival of her annual Christmas letters (usually between late spring and mid-summer, but occasionally in January of the following year) an eagerly anticipated event. In addition to her categorical rejection of timelines, she was also renowned for and proudly unapologetic of writing a bit more than strictly necessary (actually, a lot more), and would surely have embraced the hybrid bio-obituary concept.

Despite her general contempt for the months of December, January, and February in the Upper Midwest, also November, March, and sometimes October and April, when Hans proposed an epic family adventure to Tanzania, she greeted the prospect with a mix of dread, horror, stubborn denial and, ultimately, resignation. By the time of the family's embarkation, she had become firmly convinced that we would all die variously of malaria, schistosomiasis, or sleeping sickness, or by being bitten by a venomous black mamba, puff adder, or cobra, gored by aggressive Cape Buffalo, devoured by lions, bisected by angry hippos, scavenged by hungry hyenas, or trampled by elephants. That was assuming we didn't all perish in a fiery plane wreck at one of the three African airports we passed through that were on the list of the world's five most dangerous. Disappointingly, not a single family member suffered any of these glamorous demises, although near misses included a killer bee swarm attacking the elementary school field trip and an irate rhino nearly upending the Landcruiser after Hans' well-intentioned attempt to get just a little closer for a good photo. Although unaware of it at the time, Hans' three-year hunting safari would become one of the cornerstones of her life, mainly because she realized shortly after arrival in Africa that the paltry professorial salaries at UWSP could never afford her a comparable cadre of competent full-time live-in house staff in the United States. She came to embrace the clothing-optional norms for young children after Sabine returned home with a not-quite-dead baby cobra in her pocket. While that particular misadventure didn't meet wooden spoon standards, sneaking out to climb the guava tree after dark apparently did. After struggling for years with her own lackluster attempts to live up to the impossibly high standards expected of German housewives, it was at the Morogoro International School where she discovered her aptitude for teaching and made a number of lifelong friendships.

Though she was late to come to it, she embraced the work of teaching high school English at SPASH with gusto. Or at least she embraced the companionship of her fellow inmates in Writers' Workshop, incarcerated in the company of a few thousand peri-pubescent teenagers. It is unfortunate that ChatGPT arrived too late to be of use to her in her teaching work. She surely would have delighted in its potential to turn students' otherwise unintelligible hash into something readable without her editorial input, leaving her more time to rhapsodize on the...well, who are we kidding, to procrastinate. Despite vigorously denying any athletic inclinations whatsoever, she was an all-weather Green Bay Packers fan who, nevertheless, often refused to watch important games for fear of jinxing them. It was undoubtedly a lingering regret of hers that, flying in the face of her most ardent efforts, none of her children went on to become spectacularly successful figure skaters or even gymnasts, innumerable hours spent viewing those sports in various Olympic broadcasts notwithstanding.

As her children grew and matured, after a fashion, she came to realize that the only living organism as needy and time-consuming as a human child is a horse, so she naturally gravitated to the raising, training, and breeding of champion Oldenburgs. There is no questioning the fact that she loved her grandchildren dearly, but they were conveniently someone else's problem, so her horses became the lodestar of her pre- and post-retirement years. The time she spent with the various members of the "Old Mares Club" was restorative and therapeutic for her, facilitating the ability to freely grouse about spouses' foibles and idiosyncrasies while simultaneously appearing to be engaged in a constructive hobby. Once cooking for the children was no longer one of the chores on her plate, she did her utmost to counteract Hans' growing infatuation for "macrobiotic living", noting that "the breakfast table looks like most of the menu items have been gathered by bushmen in the Kalahari", by continuing to "experiment in macrocaloric eating". One can question the nutritional wisdom of some of her culinary choices, but there is no doubt that her core diet of Subway sandwiches, M&Ms (and chocolate in all its myriad forms), potato chips, and Beringer Pinot Grigio ("the good stuff") effectively staked out the territory across the trenches from the healthy living fanatics and fitness nuts.

An avid lifelong collector of incomplete projects (knitting, scrapbooks, higher education degrees of various sorts), she would have included herself in that category. While her illness robbed her too soon of her eloquent facility with languages, both English and German, her deep love for animals, silliness with her grandchildren, and coquettish smile thankfully remained. Her dementia also gave her a new sense of joy and wonder at everyday objects. She discovered animal faces in each and every single piece of driftwood and bark she encountered, and there was not a dried leaf or pinecone whose inner beauty she couldn't appreciate, even when those sharing living space with her struggled at times to differentiate between the natural treasures and yard debris.

At the end, she was peaceful and well cared-for by the kind staff at Edgewood Missoula Memory Care. True to herself, she enjoyed chocolate and brownies to the last. When asked if she was okay, her final words, delivered with a smile, were "of course!" She was much loved and will be terribly missed.

Family and friends are invited to join in a celebration of her life next summer in Rocky Mountain National Park, date to be determined. We will spread her ashes in the high mountain meadow where her brother, father, and mother can be found among the alpine flowers and vistas, then gather for a marathon viewing of Dirty Dancing, Out of Africa, Superman, and any movie with Harrison Ford in it. Please bring chocolate and white wine.

In lieu of flowers, mourners looking to liberate themselves of unneeded wealth might consider donating to one or more of the following charities looking to advance treatment and ultimately cure frontotemporal dementia:

The Bluefield Project : https://www.bluefieldproject.org

The Association for Frontotemporal Degeneration : https://www.theaftd.org