Talk for Cynthia's memorial, Dec. 3, 2006. Held at apartment of Kathy Klein Eddy, a neighbor and close friend.

We're here to celebrate the life of Cynthia Copeland Cochran, who died in London on Oct. 21 near the end of a glorious trip. Even though she was 82 and her health was beginning to fail, she wouldn't give in to old age and decided to travel once more around the world. She flew first to China, then went to Bangkok where she boarded a ship to Durban, South Africa, stopping in Vietnam along the way.

After spending a wonderful time with friends in Durban and Johannesburg, she took a long flight to London, but collapsed just before it landed and died the following morning in a London hospital. She died doing what she loved to do and avoided what she had most feared--being incapacitated at the end of her life.

I'm the stepdaughter of her brother Vincent, and I'll tell you a little of the highlights of her life, as I know them.

Cynthia was born in 1923 in Buffalo, N.Y., the youngest of seven children. Her mother, Ethel, was born in England and while quite young had gone to Canada as an indentured servant--she had to work off the cost of her passage before she was free to do what she wanted. Ethel was another bold woman, who left her family for a new continent at a time when most women feared traveling alone.

Cynthia's father, A. Stanley Copeland, was an attorney who only took cases he believed in, so that meant they had very little money, especially after the Depression started. Later you'll hear in Cynthia's own words about her father, who was both a dreamer and an activist in his own way.

I guess you could consider their family middle class, but they lived very near the edge, especially after her father died. Vince joined the Army in the middle of the Depression just to get the "three hots and a cot" and so he could send a little money home to his mother and brothers and sisters. But he finally was able to buy his way out and get jobs acting, and eventually joined the road company of a play called "Mamba's Daughers," starring Ethel Waters, where he had a chance to see much of the country.

These experiences during the Depression convinced both Vincent and later Cynthia that capitalism was a crisis-ridden, inhuman system and had to be replaced with socialism. They both remained committed socialists their whole lives.

In 1940 Vince left a promising stage career and moved back to Buffalo to become a labor organizer. Both he and Cynthia worked in heavy industry during the war. She and her sister Lois moved to Los Angeles, where they got jobs in an aircraft plant. I think Cynthia was around 20 at that time, and she had that jaunty "Rosie the Riveter" style that never left her.

I'd like to throw in here my first memory of Cynthia. It was kind of traumatic, so that's probably why I remember it. I was about 5, she would have been 17. It was in Buffalo. My mother had just moved there to marry Vince. He was 10 years younger than my mom, but love had conquered all, including the fact that he was taking on not only a wife but her two small kids.

Cynthia was very beautiful, tall and leggy. She had a big Schwinn bicycle and she wanted to teach me to ride. She put me on the seat, ran down the block with the bike, and then let go. The problem was, my feet didn't reach the pedals. I learned that even when someone is older than you, it doesn't make them wiser.

Cynthia was married briefly in Los Angeles to someone named Maurice, but it was toward the end of the 40s, I think, that she met the love of her life, Bert Cochran. He was a Jewish intellectual but also a labor organizer for the UAW who had participated in some of the volcanic uprisings of the auto workers during the 1930s. She fell for him like a ton of bricks and moved to New York.

Some time in the fifties, I believe, she became a nurse and eventually specialized in electro-convulsive therapy--ECT or "shock" treatment. It had become controversial because of being used as a panacea for too many things, but she always passionately defended its use in the treatment of certain conditions, especially depression. She wrote an article about its effectiveness for the American Journal of Nursing.

By 1990 Cynthia had retired but still had an abundance of energy. And she had both physical and political courage. Like her father, she was ready to take a stand on issues in which she had no personal interest or gain -- she just did it on principle.

So when the AIDS epidemic started, and the government didn't respond because of bigoted policies toward both gays and drug addicts, she became an activist with the AIDS movement. She was one of eight people arrested for handing out hypodermic needles in an action meant to dramatize the failure of the government to come up with a humane policy to prevent one of the ways this new disease was being spread: among people addicted to illegal substances.

A jury acquitted all of them in an important victory for the AIDS movement.

My stepfather Vincent died in 1993 after suffering from multiple illnesses. My mother Libby had already died, as had Cynthia's husband, Bert. Cynthia took on a great deal of responsibility for her brother's care at the end, when he was at home in a hospice program. She was a tremendous help and provided a way for both of them to relive their youth and share old memories.

I'm sure many of you here have similar stories about Cynthia's kindness and her willingness to put herself out on behalf of others.

And, above all, her feistiness. She wouldn't let something go if she thought an injustice was involved. And she was deeply interested in other people, always thinking of what she could do for them. Sometimes she'd take you by surprise with an idea for rearranging your life that seemed to come out of the blue. But she always was well-intentioned and generous and often I think it was just a way to get a good conversation going.

The more I learn about her life, the greater the respect and love I have for this remarkable woman.