Marilyn Dudley’s journey through her sixty-four years was an American
journey, and also a Martian journey. The eldest child of a small-town
working-class family in South Carolina in the 1950s, she was the first
in her family to go to college. As significant an achievement as that
was for her family, this was only the beginning of her journey.
Although she now had a bachelor’s degree from Winthrop College, she chose to enlist in the United States Army toward the end of the Vietnam War, hoping to be selected to attend Officer Candidate School later. After training at Fort Jackson, South Carolina, she was assigned to the 172nd Light Infantry Brigade at Fort Richardson, Alaska, where she came to the notice of then Lieutenant Colonel H. Norman Schwarzkopf, the brigade’s deputy commander. LtCol Schwarzkopf selected Private Dudley to participate in what was then a daring experiment: to train her as an arctic and mountain combat infantry soldier. Marilyn was one of the original “GI Janes,” and she wore the blue infantry rope with great pride.
Marilyn cut short her enlistment to raise a family; however, her only child had multiple birth defects and lived only a few days. These are the sorrows which only a woman can know and bear. Following this personal tragedy, she resumed her education, earning two master’s degrees from the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, where she pioneered the use of aerial and satellite imagery to discover archaeological sites in Alaska and also developed public policy for the rational management of the state’s vast energy lands.
Marilyn returned to South Carolina in the late 1980s to enter the doctoral program in sociology at the University of South Carolina. Once again, she was a pioneer, developing an objective, quantitative coding method to study the incidence of social deviance in polar expeditions and space missions. Her work verified the “Third Quarter Phenomenon,” the hypothesis that acts of social deviance within a small, isolated group tend to spike just after the midpoint of an expedition. Her data also showed that the more diverse a crew was--in professional background, age, and gender--the better it got along, and the fewer and less intense the acts of social deviance the crew experienced. It was Marilyn’s belief that her findings had important implications for future long-duration expeditions into deep space, including to Mars and to asteroids.
In the late 1990s, Marilyn was selected as the primary North American female candidate to participate in a long-duration space mission simulation at the Institute for Biomedical Problems in Moscow. Dues to a scheduling conflict, she was obliged to rotate to the backup assignment in favor of a Canadian researcher. In any case, during her work on this project, she co-authored a technical note on feminine hygiene procedures aboard the Russian space station simulator, for despite having launched the first woman in to space, the Soviet/Russian space program actually had very little experience with women in space.
I met Marilyn just as she was competing her work on her PhD. We happened to be on the initial design team for a Mars surface habitat simulator, which, although the design later changed significantly, versions were deployed in the Canadian arctic and in the Great Basin of the American West. Together we worked on many symposium papers to increase the knowledge base for sending humans to Mars someday, a day which we both hoped to live to see. We were a Martian couple, not in the sense of being space aliens, of course, but in the sense that we were among a relatively small but international community working for the day when humans would not simply walk on Mars and return to Earth, but transform Mars into a new planetary home for humankind.
Yet, in another sense, and perhaps more real, Marilyn was a Martian. In Italian, marziana means not only a stranger, but the ultimate outsider. Marilyn was all of that. Even in the 21st century, to be a brilliant and well-educated woman is to be despised as a witch and to be feared, most especially by male colleagues. I have no doubt that as much as she was able to achieve in her life, she would have accomplished even more had she been a man. She could be rather mannish in her handling of confrontations, never backing down; she was scarcely a shrinking violet, and this was something that neither men nor women could easily accept. She suffered more than a few professional setbacks due to this. It was this mannish woman which I did dearly come to love, and moreover, to respect.
Emblematic of her strength of character and courage, Marilyn deployed to Afghanistan as a civilian contractor to the United States Army as an intelligence asset in 2008 at the age of 55. Here she stepped directly into the culture clash not only of being an academic in a combat zone, but also into the culture clash of being an intelligent, middle-aged woman in a quintessentially young man’s world, in which post-adolescent testosterone only valued women if they were Barbie dolls. The outcome of this combined culture clash was not only unfortunate, it poorly served the interests of the United States of America in its struggle against terrorism, for whatever our ages, our genders, or our professional backgrounds, we must be one team, one fight if we are to prevail. But young reservists called to active duty derided her as a fat old woman, unable to believe that she had once worn the same blue infantry rope, oblivious to her experience and to her wisdom. Yet again, Marilyn was the Martian, the unwelcome outsider. She had lived so long that her youthful accomplishments were denied by foolish young men who had no sense of history. As I drove to Fort Leavenworth through the “Martian weather” of mid-western winter to receive her return from the theater of operations, mindful that she might not return at all, in my mind, Sheryl Crow’s “On Borrowed Time” became our theme song.
When I met Marilyn, I had stagnated for twenty years, going nowhere in particular in my life. Simply meeting her, seeing her example, hearing and reading her ideas, inspired me to retool and to better myself. I returned to school in my late forties, earning first a master’s degree and then a doctorate. During these years we often bounced ideas off each other, sparking each other’s intellects and putting those results to text, presenting our jointly-authored papers at aerospace symposia. Marilyn was no less a valuable sounding board to me during my pursuit of these two degrees.
During the past eight years, Marilyn and I had settled in the Kingdom of Tonga in the South Pacific. We had come to teach at first, and later we had settled into semi-retirement as I continued my schooling. I sometimes referred to her as “my dearest partner of greatness,” as Shakespeare’s Macbeth saluted his lady, for whatever small greatness we might achieve, we would achieve together, even were it a barren throne which we must bequeath to others not our biological progeny. She fell ill with several mosquito-borne tropical diseases, one after another, contending with their aftereffects for three years. A few months after earning my doctorate in juridical sciences in space, cyber, and telecommunications law at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, I returned to Tonga to reunite with Marilyn. Now that I had completed the solo work of my dissertation which had consumed my efforts for two years, I was looking forward to the many works we would write together as two doctors and two Martians. As I traveled to her, on my mind was “On Borrowed Time.”
Our borrowed time had come to an end. I came home from the airport to find Marilyn sleeping, or so I thought. Having been gone for eight months, I had no idea how ill she had become during my long absence. I had spoken to her by telephone several times during my stay in the United States, but she had always assured me that her health was improving. I lay down beside her that evening, aching from a full day’s travel a quarter of the way around the world, trekking through airports on knees long past their warranty. I was determined to argue the next morning that Marilyn should go to the United States for medical care while I remained in Tonga to care for our dogs and cats, so that when she recovered her health and returned to Tonga, we could resume our work together. I had made the same suggestion by telephone several times during the past eight months, but I was now prepared to be more forceful in person. She slipped away quietly next to me that very night. We never exchanged a single word. As Macbeth said of his lady’s untimely demise, “She should have died hereafter. There would have come a time for such a word… tomorrow....”
I will continue Marilyn’s work, the work into which she initiated me, the work of all our yesterdays, and of all our tomorrows which should have been. I will continue the mission alone to the best of my ability, while this brief candle yet flickers. I owe her my life, and only in this way can I give it to her.
While I was away in America for eight months, I completed work on a novel which I so much looked forward to sharing with Marilyn, her having had both a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in English literature, as well as having been an avid fan of the science fiction genre. In that way we both lived in the future more than in the present. Set two and half centuries in the future, one of the principle characters in my novel is a man who recently has been brought back to life in interstellar space after 266 years of hibernation, to find that twelve of his companions have perished during that long sleep. The soliloquy I wrote for my fictional character a few months ago is fitting to include herein:
“My comrades, my friends, my brothers and sisters, have I come too late to mourn you? Do you excuse this tardy funeral and its pitiful attendance? I was in a timeless sleep while your last breaths slipped away only a few meters from my heedless serenity, and then I awakened light-years away to find that you had departed centuries ago for that eternal state which awaits us all, a state whose frontier is unmarked, yet which we all know is much closer than we would like. How lost in time we all are in our different ways. I would ask you now, do we ever find our way? Shall we be together again? Is there some rescue as we sink into the blackness? Is there any answer? But if you know now what you did not know when you could speak, your knowledge is a silent one, incommunicable to those who are most desperate to know it. And so here in the firmament our ancestors once imagined was the abode of gods, we have become the masters of many worlds, yet we are as ignorant as the first ape who realized that his time on Earth would someday end. This is all we understand even now: that it ends. What is the purpose of knowing this? How is it useful in any way? What unjust gods would freely impart to us this unhappy lesson and deny us learning more?”
Marilyn would have understood had she but lived to read these poor words. Born on Earth in a land where old times are not forgotten and now being laid to rest in the land where time begins, born in the twentieth and living though the early part of the twenty-first, Marilyn was a woman of centuries we have yet to see, and of worlds upon which we have yet to set foot.
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