[WCADP-list] Marie Bernard, Former WCADP Steering Committee Member and Longtime Peace Advocate, Passes Away

[wcadp-list at lists.drizzle.com]

It is with great sorrow that we mark the passing of Marie Bernard.  Marie
was a member of the WCADP Steering Committee for many years until her health
required she retire earlier this year.  During her tenure Marie was
intimately involved in the struggle to abolish the death penalty.  Marie
gave countless hours to education, outreach, public policy work, and
fundraising.  After her retirement from the Steering Committee she continued
to volunteer with WCADP.  Marie was working on the Annual Dinner and Auction
just last month.
 
Marie will truly be missed.  A public memorial celebrating her social
justice work is scheduled for 10 a.m. April 23 at the University Friends
Meeting House, 4001 Ninth Ave N.E., Seattle.
 
  _____  

 
The following is a copy of an article from Saturday's Seattle P-I:
 
Saturday, April 16, 2005 

Marie Bernard, 1936-2005: Longtime activist was 'peace worker' 

By KERY MURAKAMI 
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER 

What was most remarkable for Mary Gleysteen in January when she saw her
friend Marie Bernard blocking the gate outside the Trident submarine base in
Bangor was recalling the first time they met 34 years earlier. 

They were among the Vietnam War protesters who camped by the Hood Canal
Bridge, jumping into rowboats to try to get in the way of Navy ships headed
to war. Bernard, who died Sunday of congestive heart failure in her Phinney
Ridge home, had sat in an aluminum rowboat with a rope tied to another
rowboat. A ship sailed in between, catching the rope and pulling both boats
along. 

"Eventually the Coast Guard came and cut the rope or they would have been
pulled out into the Strait" of Juan de Fuca. 

Bernard was 35 then, and the first five of her six children were camping
with the protesters. 

Then in the snow in Bangor this Martin Luther King Jr. Day, there was
Bernard, 68 and a grandmother, standing in a line of 11 people. 

"That was the amazing thing. She was still doing it," Gleysteen said.
"Activism was a constant in her life, and she had stayed true to her
values." 

She was arrested at the protest in Bangor this year. It was the last of what
her friends estimate was more than a dozen times she was arrested opposing
war and nuclear proliferation and demanding social justice. 

Born in South Bend, Ind., she was the daughter of a lawyer who worked for
the University of Notre Dame. She held a number of jobs, and left home in
her early 20s for New York to be an actress. 

She married and lived in Florida for a while, before settling in Seattle in
about 1964. She worked as a Head Start teacher, and then in her 60s earned a
master's degree in conflict resolution from Antioch University. 

But as she once told Gleysteen, "Some people are doctors or lawyers or
engineers. I'm a peace worker." 

Bernard was raised a Catholic. Her youngest daughter, Yoshiko Matsui, said
she wasn't overtly religious, but "she always told me, 'You don't know if
the person standing on the corner asking for spare change is Jesus.' She
used to say those kinds of things infrequently, but her faith was visible,
and I came to understand it was the grounding of her work." 

She was also stubborn, said her daughter Catherine Barashkoff-Kirkland. 

An early opponent of the Trident submarine and its nuclear warheads, Bernard
testified against the opening of the base in 1974: "When I think about
having Trident built anywhere, it doesn't bother my head, my intellect, as
much as it bothers my soul." 

Over the years, she was involved in a variety of other issues, from
protesting Seattle's law barring people from sitting on sidewalks to
opposing both wars against Iraq. 

During a protest of the first war, during Seafair in 1991, Bernard wore a
crown and a "Miss Invasion 1991" sash across her chest. According to an
account of the protest in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, she knew that many
at the parade, which welcomed home returning sailors, viewed her with
disdain. 

"It's agonizing and stressful beyond belief to do this ... ," she said. "But
if we don't do something, another person could be dead." 

In 2003, she was one of 10 arrested as 275 protesters opposed the war in
Iraq outside the Jackson Federal Building in Seattle. 

Last Mother's Day, Barashkoff-Kirkland asked Bernard what she wanted to do.
She wanted to protest the Trident base. "So that's what we did. I brought my
children, and we pushed the strollers. My older daughter carried a flower." 

Bernard is survived by six children: Ivan Barashkoff, Sophia Barashkoff,
Catherine Barashkoff-Kirkland, Alex Barashkoff, Andre Barashkoff, and
Matsui. She also had eight grandchildren. 

A memorial Mass will be celebrated at 9:30 a.m. today at St. Benedict
Parish, 1805 N. 49th St., in Seattle. 

Another memorial, celebrating her work for peace and justice, will be held
at 10 a.m. April 23 at the University Friends Meeting House, 4001 Ninth Ave
N.E., Seattle. Both services are open to the public.
 
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The Washington Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty
P. O. Box 3045
Seattle, WA 98114
(206) 622-8952
www.abolishdeathpenalty.org <http://www.abolishdeathpenalty.org/> 
 
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