Alison “Mickey” Mizner

WATERVILLE – Alison “Mickey” Mizner – beloved wife, mother, grandmother, sister, aunt, and friend, lover of books, animals, and conversation – died peacefully at her home in Waterville on Jan. 14, 2024. The cause was cancer. She was 88.

Mickey moved to Waterville with her husband, John Mizner, in 1963 after he got a job teaching English at Colby, and they lived on West Court with their children Sarah and David. Even as she endured the debilitating effects of cancer and chemo, she often expressed gratitude for her life in Waterville, which followed a difficult childhood and early adulthood. “I never expected my life to be this good,” she said last year.

Born on Staten Island in 1935, Mickey was the daughter of Henry Bamford Parkes, a historian, and Mollie Brown, a psychologist. She had an older sister, Nancy, who she would stay close to throughout her life. When Mickey was three, the family moved to Yorktown on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.

Her early childhood coincided with World War II, and Yorktown was home to many German immigrants who supported Hitler. Mollie, who was Jewish, told Mickey to avoid certain stores that were run, she said, by Nazis and didn’t let her play with children in the neighborhood.

Although she became an avid reader as soon as she could read, Mickey didn’t like school and frequently got into trouble. Her parents pulled her out of public school and enrolled her in Walden, a private school on the Upper West Side. Most of the students there came from wealthy families, and Mickey felt out of step with her classmates.

Mickey lived at home while attending New York University and graduated as an English major. For her first salaried job, she worked as a case manager with the Bureau of Child Welfare. The experience was formative for Mickey, who would later write that the people she visited never had a real chance in life due to “racism, poverty, and bureaucratic intransigence.”

On a blind date, she met John, who was working toward a PhD in English at the University of Pennsylvania. They were an ideal match. John, having endured a traumatic childhood as a Holocaust refugee, needed a caretaker, a role that came naturally to Mickey. John, meanwhile, was the dependable, stabilizing force that Mickey needed. “We had a sense that we were saving each other,” Mickey said. They were engaged after six weeks and married in 1959.

John took a job at Colby, which was in a state neither he nor Mickey had visited. In 1967, shortly before Sarah was born, they moved to West Court. David was born two years later. Mickey loved being a mother and would describe these early years with her children as some of her happiest.

Mickey was intent on giving her children a “normal” childhood. Sarah and David walked to Pleasant St. School and played with kids in the neighborhood, free to roam as long as they made it home for dinner. Unhurried days and free summers gave Mickey and John time to do the things they loved. They took enormous pleasure in food, travel, day trips to Great Pond and the coast, movies at Railroad Square Cinema, and the many friends they made through Colby.

Among their friends, dinner parties were common, and Mickey and John frequently hosted. All the families gathered every Thanksgiving, and Mickey became known for her “famous” cheesecake.

Mickey spent long hours with friends. They went for walks, met for lunch (at the Last Unicorn or, later, Riverside Market), and drank tea in the living room on West Court. Wherever they were, they talked. Mickey’s attentiveness and empathy made her a trusted advisor and confidante, who always seemed to know what to say and what not to say.

In the late seventies, Mickey got a degree in speech therapy at the University of Maine Orono and started working in the elementary schools, helping students overcome stutters and other impediments.

Mickey was attuned to the emotional needs of her children. She was tolerant of their blunders (but made her disappointment clear) and took pride in their achievements. She also paid attention to what was happening in their schools and didn’t hesitate to champion her values. For example, she spoke out against a teacher’s anti-Black racism and put the kibosh on a proposed “Ms. Ugly” contest, a reverse beauty pageant in which boys would dress up as girls.

Mickey enjoyed watching her children play sports and might have even felt a bit of “Panther Pride” when David’s basketball team won the state championship in 1985. She sometimes marveled, not sadly, at how “normal” her own life had become.

She and John loved to travel. They took many trips to Europe, first with the children then without. Perhaps their favorite destination was the French Riviera, where John’s father lived. The family often went to New York City, because both grandmothers lived there, and in later years John and Mickey continued to visit, eventually buying an apartment in the city with the idea that they would spend time there after John retired.

But it was not to be. In 1998, shortly before his retirement, John was diagnosed with kidney cancer. Mickey immersed herself in the task of caring for him. The cancer progressed rapidly in the fall, and he died at home in December at the age of 66.

It was after John’s death that Mickey, trying to process her enormous grief, began to write, first about his sickness, then about her childhood and her family. Having read thousands of books in her life, Mickey discovered that she herself was a writer.

Gradually, she began to enjoy what she called her “new chapter,” which included, to her neverending delight, grandchildren – six of them. Although she traveled regularly to see her children and their families, Mickey spent the vast majority of her time in Waterville. She read for hours every day, doted on her cats (Maxi, then Isabelle and Wesley, then Lucy), did yoga, researched and supported animal welfare efforts, kept up on both local and national politics, volunteered in a senior companion program, and met friends for movies and meals.

As the years passed since John’s death, occasionally Mickey expressed surprise at how happy she felt, and she knew this was attributable, in large part, to her friends. She deepened old relationships and formed new ones.

These friends cared for Mickey throughout her seven-year sickness. They took her to medical appointments, brought her dinner, slept over, shopped for her, sat with her, and ultimately enabled her to die as she wanted, at home.

Mickey lived mindfully, taking little for granted. Even during chemo cycles, she took joy in her many pleasures, whether it was her daily phone call with Nancy, an episode of All Creatures Great and Small, or one of the mini-Butterfingers she kept in the fridge.

Eventually, full-time care was needed. Mickey, with her gift for intimacy, developed meaningful relationships with the women who cared for her. It seemed only natural that she would make new friends in the last weeks of her life.

Mickey said that she felt lucky for all she had and that she took peace in knowing her children were in a “solid place.” Her main concern in her final days: she wanted to make sure that Sarah and David would find a nurturing new home for Lucy, her shy cat.

Mickey is survived by Sarah, her husband Josh, David, his wife Miri; her grandchildren Anna, Sophie, Nate, Milo, Gideon and Izzy; her sister Nancy and several nieces and nephews.

A celebration of life will be held on June 22 at 10:00 a.m. at Lorimer Chapel and Colby, with a luncheon reception to follow at 2 West Court.