Peace activist, ordained minister, the city’s official calligrapher and founder of the Santa Fe Living Treasures organization – Mary Lou Cook was all of these, but she lived by a single mantra.
“Her constant admonition was to be kind,” Santa Fe real estate agent Bob Cardinale said Monday.
Cook died at age 95 of congestive heart failure about 6:30 a.m. Monday at the Bee Hive assisted living home in Santa Fe.
Cook’s long list of community activities touched many parts of the Santa Fe community.
She co-founded both the Greer Garson Theatre and the Concerned Citizens for Nuclear Safety. She created the popular “Black Kindness” bracelet with the word “kindness” printed in 17 languages.
A busy “weddingmeister” as a minister in the Eternal Life Church – she oversaw as many as 90 weddings or commitment ceremonies in a year’s time – Cook also was one of the first artists at the Shidoni Foundry.
She was state chairman of the 2004 Dennis Kucinich campaign for president, creating a book of Kucinich quotes, and a longtime advocate for a state Department of Peace. She wrote or co-wrote numerous other books, including “The Book of Kindness” and “Open Endings: After Divorce and Other Changes.”
An easily recognizable local icon as an inveterate hat-wearer, Cook bought a new broomstick skirt at the Santa Fe Indian Market every summer.
In the 1980s, she was the city’s official calligrapher, even providing the lettering to the seal of the city of Santa Fe. She also practiced and wrote a book about “pastecraft” – the use of paste, fabric and shellac to cover solid objects.
Cook herself was named a Santa Fe Living Treasure by the organization she founded, the Santa Fe Network for the Common Good, when she turned 70.
“They all ganged up and made me a treasure,” she said in 2008, when all of Santa Fe was invited to her 90th birthday party at the Museum of International Folk Art.
New Mexico Supreme Court Justice Barbara Vigil met Cook when Cook was teaching a class on “How to Organize Your Life” at Santa Fe Community College. Cook also taught at St. John’s College and the College of Santa Fe.
“We became friends,” Vigil said. “She’s just a very remarkable person. Her whole philosophy in life was ‘You have a choice to live in peace or fear. I choose peace.’ ”
Vigil and Cook had been working on a book called “The Little Book of Secrets for Girls” filled with advice on how to become empowered young women.
“I haven’t finished it,” Vigil said. Cook had a hard time working on it the last two months as she became weaker and weaker.
“She’s just one of those people who gets life and who understands what it means to struggle and turns that into availability to inspire,” Vigil continued. “She was an inspiration to me. She never criticized anyone. She always saw the best in people.”
Mayor’s proclamation
Earlier this month, Santa Fe Mayor David Coss declared a “Mary Lou Cook Day.”
“Her friends had asked,” Coss said Monday. “She has done so much for Santa Fe. When you think of kindness and compassion, you thought of Mary Lou.”
Coss said he had known Cook since the 1990s and that he will miss her words of encouragement.
“She was very kind to us politicians,” he said. “She’d tell us we were doing great.”
Born in a Chicago elevator, Cook spent her early years in El Paso, then moved from Kansas City to Des Moines and Milwaukee before settling in Santa Fe in 1969. She studied calligraphy in London with Donald Jackson, scribe to Queen Elizabeth. She and her late husband Sam had three children: Courtney, Caren and Sam. Cardinale met Cook at a local copy shop in 1992. Cook was copying pages from “A Course in Miracles,” a self-help curriculum aimed at personal transformation. Soon he was attending weekly meetings about the course in her home.
“She was like the spiritual mother of Santa Fe,” he said. “She really carried the light, not in an intellectual way, but in a very emotional and spiritual way. There was a special quality about her that attracted people.”
As Cook’s health deteriorated and she was forced to sell her home, course members drove her to meetings or came to visit her in the nursing home, he said.
Santa Fe psychotherapist Leslie Nathanson was another member of Cook’s “A Course in Miracles” study group.
“She had it in her home for 25 years,” Nathanson said. “She had the capacity to tune into a person and make them feel like they were the most special, interesting and important person in the world. It was a very deep gift.”
Fought leukemia
Cook was fearless when she was diagnosed with a form of leukemia in her 50s, a disease she fought three times, Nathanson continued.
“She bounced right back,” Nathanson said. “She’s kind of like the (Energizer) Bunny. It was, ‘This is what’s happening.’ … She invested completely in the healing power of love.”
As one of the first artists and eventual president of the Shidoni Foundry, she helped convert a former chicken ranch into an arts center. “You can’t make this stuff up,” Nathanson said. “She got on her hands and knees scrubbing the chicken (poop) out of the coop to use as her calligraphy studio.”
Cook had been in hospice for some time, according to Nathanson.
“She was really ready,” Nathanson said. “She’d say to her friends, ‘You know, I’m 94; it’s been a lot of years. It’s been a good life.’ She was happy with what was.”
Even at the end, she still asked her friends how they were doing.
“She even asked me if I’d read the paper,” Nathanson said. “She was, ‘How are you?’ I’m happy; I’m peaceful.”
Services will be scheduled for a later date, Cook’s daughter Caren said. “People will be coming from all over the world,” she said. “You can’t just make a plane reservation in a day.”
Admirers were drawn to Cook because they sensed her graciousness was genuine, her daughter said.
“It was so real to her,” she said. “It was just who she was.”
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