In Memory of My Father,
Richard Levins (1930-2016)
By Aurora Levins Morales (January 22, 2016)
A week ago, I flew home from Puerto Rico and my father, Richard Levins, entered hospice. Over the next five days the rest of my life was suspended as children, grandchildren and close friends gathered around him and accompanied him through his dying process. He died on the afternoon of January 19.
I feel incredibly fortunate to have been his child. My father came from a long line of Jewish radicals. He became fascinated with biology at an early age, and it was always integrated with his political passions. He became one of the world's most influential ecologists and philosophers of science. He also played a significant leadership role in the Puerto Rican independence movement of the 1950s and 60s, and for more than fifty years, helped to develop Cuban science, mentoring generations of ecologists, teaching and advising. He was raised by a feminist grandmother, and was a strong ally to women, starting with my mother, but extending to many women scientists whom he mentored and supported, and to me, his daughter. And, he would want me to add, he spent a period of his life as a blacklisted farmer in the mountains of western Puerto Rico,, and won second prize for carrots.
He was also a very kind, funny, warm hearted, unpretentious, and deeply honorable man. He treated children with both respect and playfulness. He always tried to answer our questions fully, filled our heads with stories, left the microscope out on the kitchen table for us to investigate the world with, and took our interests seriously. He also taught us ecology through ideas but also direct experience. As a child I walked the farm helping him collect fruit flies, marked snail shells with nail polish, went on field trips, and shared his love of the Caribbean landscape. Ecology has always been a central part of how all his children see the world.
In 2011, after our mother's death, I moved to Boston to live with and care for him. It was both extremely challenging and irreplaceably precious. We got to travel to Cuba together for his final trip, wrote together, talked about his life and mine, and became newly close.
He was father, friend and comrade. He loved the work I was doing, and it made him happy to support it financially. As I head into this new phase of my life, through so many transitions, I will carry him with me, talk with him in my mind, see the world through eyes he trained, feel the palm of his hand on the top of my head and strive to be as kind, curious, and honorable as he was.
I will be writing to you again in a few days, taking up the work again, with an essay for Tu'b'shevat, the Jewish holiday of the trees, but right now, as I sit with my loss, I invite you to learn more about this much beloved man, (and his satirical alter ego, Isidore Nabi, who lives on.)
Aurora Levins Morales can be reached at aurora@historica.us.
