Elizabeth M. ComeElizabeth M. ComeElizabeth M. Come died on December 7, 1999, just one month short of her 82nd birthday, following her gradual descent into the despair of Alzheimers. Married at twenty-one, she had been cheerful and laughing, a devoted mother of two sons, and a loving daughter to her aging parents.
In the early seventies, after her parents died and her sons had gone on to their own lives, and her husband was busy as a professor and academic administrator, she became totally absorbed in the study of ancient archaeology and history, she and a friend organized and managed a very successful thrift shop, and, contrary to her private nature, she gave scintillating annual reports to the organization sponsoring the shop. And she was secretly writing poetry. Her husband wrote of her: "The other human being whom you know most intimately remains a fathomless well of mysterious unknown depths and complexity. The closer you come to the other one's mystery, and the more the other one reveals of that mystery, the more clearly you come to see that there are even vaster regions and depths of the other's interior being which remain unknown and in large measure unknowable."