Carolyn Victoria Desmond

Carolyn Victoria Desmond was, as her name suggests, extraordinary. Whip smart, iconoclastic, fierce, loving, hilariously irreverent, intensely focused, she was also a voracious observer and piercing analyst of human cupidity in culture and politics. All of this she counterbalanced with an unwavering dedication to a uniquely extravagant creative aesthetic all her own, one that inspired many an 'objet d'art' and sustained her throughout her life.

Carolyn made life-long friends at a rate rarely surpassed while her capacity for empathy led her to leave work and dedicate herself to our mother's care during Emily's last years.

From our father, Carolyn inherited the mantle of Desmond family and then Desmond-Lauritzen family archivist. Her passing leaves a vast emptiness for Katina, Lily and me where an ocean of memories and reminders of who we are and how we came to be once swirled.

With her beloved husband, Brad, she carried on a family tradition of dog ownership with total love and devotion while the two of them immersed themselves in a creative partnership that never stopped to take a breath. Their loving Goldendoodle, Houston, proved a profound comfort and confidant in the years since Brad's passing.

There will be a volume's worth of stories to be shared among her many friends. As her brother, I'll simply conclude with a couple of snapshots of our time together as kids.

Our father, Robert Desmond, was a professor at U.C. Berkeley and a highly regarded journalist who, every few years, plucked his wife and two children out of Orinda, California and set off on year-long residencies abroad. Carolyn and I spent profoundly formative years in Holland, the U.K., Switzerland, Iraq and Iran. We circumnavigated the globe together more than once, travelled through Italy, France and Spain, Jordan, Syria and India, Thailand, Hong Kong and Japan. We crossed the Atlantic by ship in each direction, spent summers in cities on the East Coast, were present for significant historical events including JFK's inauguration which we viewed from the balcony at the Treasury Building in D.C., formed friendships with people from many different cultures and built an unshakable bond between one another in the process. We have carried those chapters as a sort of secret language since. Carolyn's passing is like losing part of myself, my history, my identity.

And, we played music together. Did you know that Carolyn was a singer? She joined me in bands in Baghdad, where we traded songs with a legendary Bedouin poet at the Arch of Ctesiphon, and again in Teheran where we performed weekly on TV and for members of the royal family in a band that included a British diplomat's son who shared lead vocals with Carolyn, the son of the Argentine ambassador on rhythm guitar, a great Persian bass player and drummer, and an American horn section. The Prime Minister's son served as our equipment manager. (A very helpful thing!) We performed together in USIS productions and played the U.S. Embassy many times that year in an outdoor space that not long after held the U.S. hostages during Iranian revolution. Two years later Carolyn carried on in her own band in Mexico while attending college there.

Those chapters proved to be creative collaborations that informed and strengthened our bond in a rare and wonderful way.

Carolyn was extraordinary and led an extraordinary life. Her absence is unfathomable and heartbreaking.