Born July 16, 1941
Bartow, Florida
Died July 7, 2023
Putney, Vermont
Details of services
A memorial service and celebration of Eva Mondon’s life will be held at Green Mountain Orchards, West Hill, Putney, on Sunday, July 16, 2023 at 10:00 am.
Eva Mondon died peacefully on July 7, 2023. Using the VSED method, she chose to stop eating and drinking on July 1 as a way to find relief from the suffering caused by rheumatoid arthritis, finally allowing her ravaged body to take precedence over her incredible lust for life. Eva was a spirited and inspiring presence in Putney for 54 years and her absence will be acutely felt by her community. There was no one like her.
The youngest of eight siblings raised in a house without indoor plumbing, Eva was born in Bartow, Florida July 16, 1941. She never knew her mother, Elizabeth Hamn Mondon, who was institutionalized shortly after Eva was born. She was fortunate to be mothered by her older sisters since her father, Doda Gorten Mondon (“Gort”) was a scary man. “I grew up barefoot and feral, climbing trees, avoiding adults. I didn’t want any of them touching me.” She shot fox squirrels and gray squirrels with a .22 to help feed the family. Her father repaired her shoes with bits of copper wire which was useful in drawing blood from the shins of boys who humiliated her at school for her poverty and for wearing feed sack dresses made by an aunt.
“Early on I knew I was a lesbian. I had no interest in boys. But the girls mostly laughed at me because we were so poor.” The impossibility of coming out as gay in rural Florida in the very early ‘60s launched Eva into a trajectory aimed at leaving her roots far behind. After graduating from Florida State in Tallahassee she went to Alaska to work with Native and homesteading elementary school children, from 1963 to ‘65, as a Volunteer in Service to America (VISTA) volunteer, and she stayed on after experiencing the shattering Anchorage earthquake of 1964. After VISTA she enlisted in the Peace Corps and spent two life-changing years in West Africa, where she learned to make the addictive peanut stew that she sneaked onto the menu 20 years later when she was lunch chef at the Saxton’s River Inn. Not wanting to return to the mainland U.S. after Africa, she took a job in the Virgin Islands before returning briefly to Florida to complete the math and science requirements for a master’s degree in Arts & Education at Florida A&M, a historically Black college in Tallahassee. Later on she joined an international brigade cutting sugar cane in Cuba. Her politics were formed by seeing the effects of poverty everywhere she went in her travels and by encountering the world as a lesbian.
In 1969 she came to Putney to finish her master’s at Antioch New England, earning her degree in ’71. “I found freedom in Vermont. It was a safe place to come out — the people were wonderful.” But there were no jobs in Vermont public schools for out lesbians at that point, so she began her career at Putney Day Care, memorably shaping the lives of hundreds of wide-eyed toddlers and young children who regarded her with awe and adoration. To a two-year-old who was trying to smuggle home a daycare doll when it fell out from beneath her dress, Eva said, “Look, if you’re gonna steal something do it right! Stick it in your underwear and you’ll get way clean. But bring it back tomorrow, hear me?”
She lived with her first great love, JoAnn Golden, at Alice Holway’s West Hill boarding house, then in an apartment over the Putney Day Care. In the mid-‘70s she and JoAnn formed a ménage with Marianna Amster in the house they built (Meadow Ark) in Westminster West. Gabrielle Amster (“our daughter”) came into Eva’s life and has remained central, a source of pride and deep affection.
Eva was a genius at friendship. One often left a conversation with her a better person. She expected a lot of herself and being her friend meant allowing her to feel entitled to expect a lot of you, too. At her core Eva was deeply empathic, wanting most of all to encourage growth and happiness among the large and diverse community of people she loved. She remained charismatically magnetic, despite her battle with constant pain and part of missing her will be missing so many random encounters with fascinating people at her home.
Too impatient to wait for reincarnation, Eva lived several lifetimes concurrently. When first in Putney she had a sideline as “Lawn Woman,” driving from job to job in her beat-up VW Bug with her LawnBoy mower riding shotgun where the passenger seat used to be. Later she was a fearless EMT first responder and was privileged to serve with the Westminster fire department. After becoming certified, she devoted herself to body and energy work. A dyke on the make for some years before publicly proclaiming her celibacy, Eva became a faithful Quaker at Putney Meeting, where she was a “released friend” for 10 years, working with traumatized survivors of abuse. She called the Quakers “the bones of social work in this country.” A role model for the value in deepening one’s self-awareness as a means of getting the most out of life and a student of Thích Nhât Hanh — who gave Eva the dharma name True Welcome — and a member of his order of interbeing. The center of so much generous attention from her community when she needed it. An enduring example of how to love the world and treasure its people vigorously while living with a progressive illness.
She loved to hand out her card, which reads:
EVA MONDON
storytelling • matchmaking
advice sought and unsought
advisor to the lifelorn
word of mouth