Talk at Memorial Services for Elizabeth Swingle, September 27, 1943

Friends - friends of Elizabeth - we have come together today to think about Elizabeth and about the mysteries of life and death.

Elizabeth was a good girl and a beautiful girl. She was a good girl, whose personality impressed itself on everyone whose life course touched on hers, and she was made beautiful by the way in which her spirit of friendliness and service shined out through her eyes.

Let me say a few words about Elizabeth's life and work during the past two years. When our program in immunochemistry was begun in the Gates and Crellin Laboratories there was need for a research worker to help with the bacteriological part of the investigations, and Elizabeth, who was Instructor in Bacteriology at the University of Montana, came to Pasadena, newly married to Stanley, to carry on this work. She had learned her science well while studying for the bachelor's degree and the master's degree in bacteriology, and she carried on her work well and faithfully, happy to be helping in the progress of science and most happy to be associated with her husband in her work as well as in her home life. And so her life rolled on along its smooth course during the year - until she saw a way to be of greater service to her friends and coworkers, a way to extend further the influence of her kindly personality. One of the most important posts in the chemical laboratory is that which involves taking care of the great stores of chemicals and apparatus and supplying them to our hundred workers as they are needed for the many researchers and for the instruction of students - Elizabeth saw the opportunity here for being of service to others, and offered to take this responsible position.

Thus for some time she had the great happiness of seeing the influence of her spirit of friendliness and unselfish service spreading through our scientific community in ever widening circles. Every one of the many people who came every day to her for help was met, not with a merely dutiful response, but with enthusiastic cooperation, with the clear, practical expression of her deep, heart-felt desire to be of use to others; and everyone came away from this contact with her happier and better.

This strong love of humanity which brought her so many friends was expressed in many ways. Thus during her first year in Pasadena she came almost daily to our house on the hill, to care for the rabbits which were being immunized; and during these visits she made a most intimate friend and great admirer of our boy Crellin, then five years old, who looked forward to each day's conference, and who has ever since numbered his talks with Elizabeth among the greatest experiences of life in this marvelous world.

My friends, while we are thinking about Elizabeth, about her beautiful, friendly spirit, we may well ask why, why was she taken away from us suddenly, without warning, while going happily about her work. I think that we can find the answer to this question by contemplating the wonders of the world in which we live - the wonderful order which underlies all natural phenomena. No one can study deeply the physical world without experiencing again and again a feeling of amazement, of transcendent exaltation, at the beautiful intricacy of the structures which constitute the physical world and the beautiful order of the laws which determine its course; and this feeling becomes ever stronger as we turn our attention to life, to man himself, and begin to understand, even though dimly, the almost unbelievably complex mechanisms of the physiological processes upon which life depends. Our faith in the future rests upon our faith in these laws of nature. And so we can understand that these laws cannot be broken, but must pursue their inexorable course even when, because of an accidental, unavoidable concatenation of circumstances, this course is such as to take from us our friend Elizabeth early in her life, while her spirit was still growing, her large circle of friends still expanding, her due cycle of life's rich experiences only to the midpoint traversed.

Our sorrow over her departure from us must be assuaged by the knowledge that during her twenty-nine years of life she brought a great store of happiness to her family, her husband, and her many friends: we are thankful for this, while grieving that her stay with us could not have been longer.