REMEMBERING CAROL BROWN: A True Believer and a Mother in Arms

Carol BrownCOLUMBIA, Mo 4/17/25 (Remembering) -- Columbia is losing another generation of true believers, slowly but no less painfully, for the people who knew and loved them and the community they adored and left behind.

My wife Alison was beside herself with grief when we heard Carol Brown had suffered the impossible, a stroke from an aneurysm that had left her on life support at Boone Hospital. Alison had seen Carol twice in just the last year, at Lowes and the Salvation Army thrift store, where they hugged and laughed and caught up and remembered.

I was stunned: Carol would surely live forever, given her dedication to healthy living and her love of the Missouri outdoors.

I've written so many Remembering columns about Columbia's true believers, it's become almost second nature for me to recognize them. And Carol was one of the most recognizable. She believed without a second thought, in the causes she fought for, spoke for, campaigned for and championed, before the City Council or in the media or on behalf of the many groups she joined or supported to do the hard work of social justice.

On her shoulders she carried the weight of history with the support of its wings. Carol had a sixties spirit, the fires of resistance burning bright in her gentle eyes, the winds of Haight-Ashbury and Woodstock waving through her hair, and words I think we throw around too cavalierly today – compassion and empathy – passing from her lips with the deepest regard.

My family and I knew Carol was not going to pull through. We knew just enough about her condition that we could feel it. Though she was still living, Carol was already gone, and in her place one of death's great hallmarks: All the memories we shared, just between us, became ours alone.

I can still see Carol on her bicycle, leading her children on their bikes to Grant Elementary or pulling up to Gerbes or Lucky's or stopping mid-pedal on Maupin Street, smiling and talking, passionately about the issues of the day or casually, about those small-talk things we keep in the back of our minds for just such occasions. I never saw a down day in Carol Brown, not once in twenty five years.

My wife and Carol – they were mothers in arms, as I think now of the Dire Straits classic, fighting the good fight, for the lives and futures of the four children between us who grew up together. From Kindergarten at Grant Elementary through graduation at Hickman High and adulthood beyond, with all the peril and hope in between: mothers in arms, in person and spirit, across “mist-covered mountains” and “baptisms of fire,” just like the song says.

I cannot adequately articulate what these two moms shared. I'll never exactly know and more importantly, never entirely understand. I'm a guy and a dad and that's just the way it is.

But I could feel their bond, when it was strong and especially when it broke -- when Carol died in February. It was not like we saw her every day or lived our lives together. It was a bond in close and distant quarters, forged from mutual understanding, shared experience, and the kind of love that brings it all together.

I don't think there's anything I've seen reveal itself more powerfully on a person's face – the moistness in their eyes, the quiver in their lips – than sorrow restrained. It's when you know the one you love has been crying a river alone.

Then a few words break through. "I loved Carol," my wife told me the evening of her passing. "I loved her very, very much."

As I've learned by close and distant observation, there's nothing like the love between mothers in arms.

Carol Christine Brown, 1963 - 2025