Rosa and Stan
Rosa Young, Stan’s colleague for over twenty years, was shocked to hear of Iris’s death when she arrived at work around 9 a.m. on August 17, 2006. Like many others, she could not at first believe it. Over the past two decades, Rosa and Iris had become close friends, and just two days earlier, Stan and Iris had visited the hydrogen lab.
Without thinking, Rosa drove over to Stan’s house, where Harvey greeted her at the door and confirmed the news. Rosa asked whether she could see Stan. “Normally I would not want too many people coming in today,” Harvey said, “but since you have been very close to Stan and Iris, I’ll let you come in.” Rosa waited in the kitchen for Stan, who was downstairs in the shower. When he appeared, “Stan just hugged me and cried and cried and cried. There’s nothing we can say,” Rosa recalled. Then he walked to his bedroom to dress. Rosa remembered saying to Harvey, “Poor Stan, how is he going to live without Iris?” Then she asked what would help at this point. Harvey said that during the next few weeks, family members would give Stan whatever support he needed. Steven was planning to live there for a couple of weeks, and Harvey also planned to take time off from his work to help Stan begin to manage his life. After that, help from friends would be much appreciated, and he asked her to spread the word. He suggested people could invite Stan to their homes, or bring food to eat with him in the house.
Rosa passed on Harvey’s suggestions, but she continued to worry about Stan’s survival. She remembered that her Greek colleague and friend Genie once remarked that when a couple is very close and one of them dies, the other often can’t survive. Over the next few months, when Rosa and her team went out for dinner, she would often say, “Why don’t we invite Stan?” Some wondered whether he would be comfortable going out with them, especially on short notice, but she’d say, “Let’s try.” And Stan almost always said, “Sure.” He was moved by Rosa’s outreach. Soon he decided that he wanted to see much more of her.
About a week after Thanksgiving, Rosa was surprised by Stan’s invitation to join him for dinner at his home. He explained that Harvey and Robin had hired someone from Grand Rapids to cook for him. Rosa recalled, “This guy put on chef’s clothes and fixed a very fancy dinner for us.” Also serving as a personal assistant and valet, he was supposed to live in the house and be available full-time. But Stan felt uncomfortable sharing his home with a stranger and moved him to a hotel. After about a month the “chef” quit.
Some days afterward, Stan asked Rosa whether he could take her out for her birthday on December 15. It had become a tradition for Stan and Iris to take Rosa to a good restaurant on her birthday. At that point, Rosa sensed “a type of personal affection,” but she was not yet aware of how deeply he felt about her. She got a stronger sense of that when she tried to fix him up with one of her friends. Stan told her irritably that he didn’t want to be fixed up with anybody.
Closer to Christmas, Stan asked Rosa what she was doing for the holidays. When she told him that she had booked a two-week trip to Egypt, Stan said, “This is not a good time for you to go to Egypt. It’s not safe.” But Rosa ignored his caution and left for Egypt. In the meantime, to prevent Stan’s being alone in the house on New Year’s Eve, a day always associated with the time when he and Iris fell in love, Robin planned a family trip to Hawaii between Christmas and New Year’s. Besides herself and Stan, the trip included Robin’s daughter Sylvie, Steven, and Steven’s recently adopted one-year-old son from Guatemala, Pablo. Stan, Iris, Robin, and Steven had been “the nuclear family that grew up together,” Robin said, and they were “probably the most comfortable with each other of any combinations. I think Mom would have been so thrilled to be on that trip, but I don’t think it would have happened,” she added, because as she aged Iris lost her desire to travel.
While Rosa was in Egypt, she turned off her cell phone to avoid the high roaming charge. When she turned it back on in January after arriving in New York, there were “ten or fifteen messages from Stan,” she said. “So I knew that he was very serious about me, but I tried to tell him, no.” She reminded him that she had resigned from ECD a few weeks before Iris’s death and was planning to stay as a consultant only until June, when she planned to move to San Diego, where she had bought a house near her sister’s. Meanwhile she had sold her Michigan house, rented an apartment in Birmingham, and crammed it with all her furniture. She had also agreed to start serving in July as science and technology adviser to the city of Chongqing, one of the largest in China.
Rosa’s objections didn’t deter Stan from spending as much time as he could with her. He would often drive to her apartment, take her out for dinner, and stay with her afterward as long as possible. It was becoming increasingly clear that Stan wanted a permanent relationship, but Rosa doubted that they could make a happy couple. She told him, “I'm not the type of person who will always agree with you. I speak my mind. And secondly, I don't cook. I live a single life and a simple life.1 I just don't think this will work.” But Stan said, “I like a woman with her own mind, and I wouldn’t marry a woman to cook for me.”
Stan knew what he wanted, but Rosa did not. She struggled to decide what to do. “At this stage of life,” she explained (she was sixty-three; Stan was eighty-four), “it is not like when you were young and fall in love, when you were just in love with being in love. You do things more rationally.” She kept going over her choices—go to China or stay with Stan—discussing them with her sister and two daughters, but not yet telling her mother. She recognized that Stan needed her, and she wanted to help, but as she told him, “If I use my brain to analyze, this won’t work.” Stan responded, “Don’t use your brain to analyze. Listen to your heart.”
Listening to her heart, she was at least willing to consider their living together, but she felt that her two-bedroom apartment, filled with all her furniture, was too cramped for the two of them. Stan, however, loved Rosa’s Birmingham place. After she moved out, he would insist that he missed her apartment, where he had felt comfortable and safe.2 On the other hand, the prospect of moving into Stan’s house on Squirrel Road made Rosa uncomfortable, for Iris seemed to be everywhere there, in the many pictures and objects, and especially in the kitchen. Stan would say, “If you don’t feel comfortable, we can build another house, or we can stay in Birmingham and rent a bigger apartment, if that’s what you want.” Appreciating that Stan was ready to “do everything,” she decided to try living in the Squirrel Road house while still keeping her Birmingham apartment. This was right at the time when Stan was asked to resign as president of ECD and sent into “exile” in the Institute for Amorphous Studies (see chapter 11), a time when his need for Rosa was greater than ever. In late March 2007, she moved in.
This point, just seven months after Iris’s death, was also when family members had to deal with Stan and Rosa’s relationship.3 For many, it was a painful adjustment. Cathie Ovshinsky remembered that Robin had called in tears. Stan had asked her to go through Iris’s things and make room for Rosa. Harvey, with his children Noah and Natasha, met Robin at the house to help. Cathie stayed home. “It wasn’t just my grief over losing Iris,” she explained, “or even my feelings toward Rosa.” It was also her anger. Despite over forty years as an integral member of the family, she had long felt increasing resentment toward Stan for what she perceived as his selfishness and lack of consideration for Iris as her health declined. After Iris died, Cathie began getting physically ill just from being in Stan’s presence; she announced to Robin and Steven that she could no longer have anything to do with him. Other family members came to terms with the situation in their own ways, and to the end Stan kept hoping Cathie would also be reconciled.
Steven accepted the change most easily. In early April, he recalled, “Stan came to California specifically to talk to me about Rosa even though I already knew all about it.” Steven’s view was, “My mother is dead. He and my mother were absolutely joined at the hip for fifty-one years, but now he was clearly miserable. And I think that any kind of happiness that he can find at age eighty-four—this amazing man—he should have it.” Steven acknowledged, “It’s been harder for other people in the family,” especially so soon after Iris’s death. “The nice thing for me and maybe why I accepted it so easily is that I don’t believe there’s been any conflict related to my mother. It’s not like she’s trying to replace my mother in any way. She loved my mother. That’s not what it’s about at all.”
For the next couple of months, Rosa and Stan lived happily in the house, and “from then on, we talked about marriage,” Rosa said. For Stan it made no difference whether they were formally married. “He has a very liberal mind,” said Rosa, “but with my Chinese upbringing, I am more conservative.” She told Stan, “I know that marriage is only a piece of paper, but if I'm going to stay with you, we should get married.” He agreed.
But Rosa had not yet actually committed to marrying Stan. She was instead still committed to starting her new job in China in July. At one point, she told Stan that she was going to leave. “I never saw him so upset.” He told her, “You should stay here. I want you to have a life with me.” She recognized how much he needed her. “He not only lost his wife. He lost the company. So you feel that with any human being, you would want to give him a helping hand. He was fighting on so many fronts.” Thinking over her choices, she realized that she also had doubts about whether she could fit into Chinese Communist society. Faced with the approaching deadline, she recognized, “I have developed a profound feeling about him. If I just drop him and leave and go to China and something happens to him, I will feel regret for the rest of my life.”
In early June, Rosa traveled to San Diego to visit her mother, who was in a hospital. She discussed her dilemma with her younger sister Marietta, who knew Stan. After listening carefully, Marietta encouraged Rosa to marry Stan. “How can you miss a chance to be loved by a man like that?” She also urged Rosa to tell their mother. When she heard that Stan and Rosa had a twenty-one-year age difference her mother’s first reaction was negative. Marietta said, “Stan is young at heart, and where can Rosa find a man who appreciates and loves her as much as Stan?” Rosa recalled, “My mom smiled and said, ‘Well, Rosa, you will make the decision.’ And so we reached the conclusion that I should stay with Stan. That was in June. I didn't really make a decision until the last moment.” A few days later, Marietta and Rosa learned that their mother had terminal cancer with only ten days to live. Rosa stayed in San Diego until her mother died on June 24. She told Stan not to come to the funeral because it meant traveling alone, but he insisted, and attended.
When Stan told Robin that he and Rosa were planning to get married, she said, “if this makes you happy, you do it, but I want you to wait one year after Mom’s death.” Stan and Rosa waited even longer, until October. Of Stan’s five children, Steven accepted the marriage most easily. His response was, “It’s fabulous.” And he added that it was “exactly what my mother would have wanted.” Robin agreed, “My mother would have wanted Stan to be happy.” At the same time, she “would have wanted to tear the eyes out of anyone who tried to do that.”
It was harder for Harvey and his family to accept what was happening. “Part of the problem with accepting the relationship was that it was shoved down our throats, especially so soon after Iris died.” Stan would say to him, “Look, this is what I need. Do you want a dead father or a live father?” “Okay, well,” Harvey said, “I want a live father, but I don’t have to like it.” Ben spoke with Stan and “made it very clear to him that I felt it was totally his life to lead.” Ben also sensed that he and Stan had “an enhanced mutual understanding—much more than at any other time in my adult life—as my wife was dying and his had just died.” After the wedding he sent an email to his siblings: “I think Rosa is good for our dad, because Rosa always speaks the truth to him.”
Some friends were initially negative about the marriage because they had loved Iris, but most were positive or gradually became so. Jeff Yang said that he told Rosa, “Thank you so much for taking care of Stan,” and added, “I think her heart opened.” Rosa insisted she wasn’t concerned by the mixed reactions to her marriage from family and friends. “Once I decided to marry him, I don’t care what the other people think. I care what I think and Stan thinks.”
One problem to deal with before the wedding was hiring a new housekeeper. After firing Harvey and Robin’s second choice for a personal assistant, Rosa found Irina Youdina, a former schoolteacher with a college degree, from Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. When she began in September she immediately got along well with Rosa, but her relationship with Stan took time to develop. At first, Stan would get upset when Irina did not instantly understand what he wanted, and in the early months, she recalled, “He’s always sick.” In time, both the communication and Stan’s health improved, and when Rosa was away on trips with her daughters, Irina would stay in the house with Stan and they would spend time together watching the news, listening to music, or just talking. She became a valued member of the household and stayed to help even after Stan’s death.
This was also the time when the house was being renovated to make it feel more like home to Rosa. The renovation was stressful for the whole family. One part that particularly distressed Robin and Harvey was the removal of the gallery of family photos that had filled a long hallway with generations of memories. When Stan had told Robin of this plan, she recalled, “I screamed at him for the only time in my life.” Harvey called it “the neutralization” and found it deeply alienating. “All the pictures of me and my brothers were removed. After that I never felt welcome in that house. I felt excluded from Dad’s new life.” And Cathie resented that she and her children could no longer spend time in the kitchen cooking—“all these family traditions just out the window.”
Rosa noted that the other family members managed to adjust. “Natasha and Noah would often come to have dinner with us. Robin, Steven, Ben, and Dale would come and stay with us.”4 But “Cathie never came to visit, although Harvey would come to the Institute and he and Stan would go for lunch.”
On October 4, 2007, Stan and Rosa were married quietly at the courthouse with only Rosa’s sister and brother-in-law as witnesses. The next day Stan called Lillian for a phone interview and to tell her about his marriage. “I don’t pretend, nor does she pretend, that she’s Iris, or that I have the same feelings about her as I did Iris. But there’s love there, and there’s understanding there, there’s a devotion there. That is a basis for building something.”
A month after their wedding, Stan and Rosa went to New York so that he could have a complicated surgery. He had been in and out of the hospital every two or three months because of recurrent blood infections, and the surgery was to correct the source of bacteria spreading from his colon. They found a cancerous tumor that had to be removed; fortunately it had not spread. There was also severe diverticulitis to be corrected. It was a long and risky surgery, but it was successful, and Stan recovered well.
During the surgery, Rosa stayed with Robin, whose apartment was in walking distance from the hospital. It was an opportunity for them to get to know each other better. Rosa also learned at this time that she would have to move her things out of her Birmingham apartment immediately because the building had been sold. While still in New York, she asked Irina, just recently hired, to work with the moving company to pack her things and ship them to San Diego. “It was a very difficult month,” Rosa recalled.
The Christmas holidays brought another medical crisis. Stan had an esophagus tear and was vomiting blood. He had to be rushed to the emergency room, where he received transfusions while continuing to lose blood.5 Robin said, “We were prepared: we’re going to lose him today. He was losing probably more than half of his body’s blood.” But after receiving six pints, Stan stopped bleeding and healed. Soon after, Stan’s health improved dramatically. Rosa joked that the young blood he had received rejuvenated him. “He is a fighter,” she said. “Nothing could defeat him.”
Everyone in the family could see that Stan was happy in his marriage. Robin noticed that Stan improved physically, exerting himself to meet Rosa’s hopes and expectations. She and Steven could always tell when Rosa came into the room while he was on the phone with them. “If by any chance he had been complaining about anything, saying he had a bad day or that he had an ache or a pain or something, all of a sudden it would be, ‘We’ve been having a great time.’ He would light up and minimize anything negative. He did not want to be a complainer in front of her. And he always wanted her to feel that he was young and vibrant and strong, and capable, and sharp. He wanted to be his very best for her.”
Robin contrasted this with the way he had often presented himself to Iris in the last years of her life, where any physical pain he was experiencing radiated to her, and she absorbed it. “She took it on like a sponge, my mother.” Robin added that Stan also knew that Rosa “was signing on for a very tough task, and that he had to make it as positive as he could, because he really needed her at the beginning of the marriage. I don’t think she had any illusion. She knew that he needed her, and that she was the only one who could really fill this hole.”
Stan never got over missing Iris, but he also loved Rosa. And Rosa loved him back. Robin saw their relationship develop over several years, recognizing that though set at a later stage of life, “it was physical, too.” She could see that “he wanted someone to take care of him because they cared about him. So it was important that Rosa care about him, but better yet that she love him. He was a very seductive guy, and he was on a campaign. I saw it in the early days, because it was so culturally different for her. She was not someone for public touch—she’s Chinese, for goodness sake. And when he would take her hand in public, I would see her kind of wince or pull back, while he spoke in effusive language about how beautiful she looked, or called her by her nickname, Tingela—he kind of Yiddishized it,” Robin said.6 “But there was a turning point, which I could not see until it was over. I saw that they had fallen in love, and that it was mutual, and that it was deep, and it was very, very sincere and sustaining.” As Robin observed, “For a self-sufficient and a strong, independent woman to even have the constitution, at sixty-three, to find those feelings, to me it’s just a fairy tale.”
Stan and Rosa both had to adjust. “We used to have some terrible fights when she worked for me,” he recalled, and there were many points where they differed. For one thing, her political views were much more conservative than his. Stan didn’t try to argue but instead involved her in discussing books about social and political issues. “She came in as a Republican; now she’s a Social Democrat,” he bragged. For Rosa, this was just part of their growing rapport. “After two years, I really know him much better on a personal level. He’s so well read; we read books together, he reads poems to me, we discuss things, and we read the paper, we express our opinions about all this, and I think it’s very stimulating. To share a life with him has really opened my eyes and enhanced my life.” Stan summed up, “She’s a marvelous person and I have genuine real affection and respect and admiration for her. Hell of a person to get into an argument with.”
For her part, Rosa found Stan to be a “very good husband, very understanding, very accommodating, and very loving and caring.” She was also struck by his generosity. For example, when they went to a restaurant he would always leave a huge tip. At first she questioned this, but he explained, “These waiters and waitresses don’t make much money. They have to raise their families and send their kids to college. This is our way to help them out.” This, Rosa said, made a big impact on her. She added, “He is a high-maintenance man, but he makes up for that.”
It was harder to coordinate their professional lives. Stan very much wanted Rosa to work with him, but she decided otherwise. “If I want to keep this marriage, it is better for me not to get involved directly with his work, because we often had different opinions and different approaches. I didn't want to have fights. And I'm not like Iris, who wanted to stay with him all the time. I need my space. And so he agreed, and we gave each other space.”
Stan understood that he had to make concessions and avoid conflicts with Rosa. In his interviews, he said over and over again, “I really want to make and keep her happy, so it is important to keep her free of stress.” Since quitting her work and marrying Stan, Rosa became more relaxed. “Before that she had high blood-pressure,” he said. Instead of trying to replicate his relationship with Iris, Stan consciously developed a new part of himself for Rosa. “When you build a new life, you have to build a new appendage to be able to function,” he said. Rosa, in turn, encouraged and supported Stan’s working on his life-long goal to make solar energy cheaper than fossil fuel.
