Virginia Forsberg Obituary

Virginia Swasey Forsberg, 1938 – 2017: Obituary by an Ungrateful/Grateful Firstborn Son

Virginia died peacefully in bed at her Ottawa home on 30 October 2017 only a few months before her eightieth birthday. For this life-long, self-taught Spiritualist/Mormon, who had a durable connection to the dead rather than the living, it seems entirely appropriate that Halloween Eve was also the occasion of her passing. She is survived by thirteen of fourteen children and her loving husband, Clyde R. Forsberg. A native of Utah, Virginia was the descendant of two famous British- and Dutch-Mormon pioneer families. Born in Bonita, Duchesne County (Little Holland), Utah, Virginia was Miss Basin Sweetheart 1955, as well as the recipient of a full scholarship to attend the Excelcis Beauty School (1956), choosing to marry instead, and just one week after graduating from high school. Her devotion to her Mormon belief in large families knew no bounds. After giving birth to fourteen healthy children in just twenty-plus years of marriage, she would leave Clyde with twelve of fourteen children to raise by himself in the 1980s, living on the streets of California, in and out of mental hospitals in Utah, but making a triumphal return to Canada some fifteen years later to finish what she and Clyde had started. Theirs is quite the love story no matter how one slices it. Virginia was extremely artistic and the inspiration for much of the creativity, imagination, and inventiveness that supervened in her absence, the great majority of her fourteen children a mingling of musicians, graphic artists, artists proper, high-level fine woodworkers, playwrights, psychologists, and historians. Two of her four daughters fulfilled (without knowing it, perhaps) Virginia’s erstwhile but unrealized dream of opening her own beauty salon. Although she remained a devout Mormon her entire life, all of her fourteen children would leave the faith. That said, her church service per se never progressed beyond that of the Adult Gospel Doctrine class, where she came to view herself as a scholar of religion—although her reading of nearly everything proved problematic, in part because she suffered from dyslexia. At one point, she claimed to receive a new revelation on behalf of her church, too, attempting to elevate the place of women in its exclusively male priesthood order of things. Her life-long battle with mental illness, and thus with originality, meant that a trip she made to Salt Lake City in the mid-1970s, with her somewhat quaint, quasi-feminist collection of ostensibly new-age shock and awe in tow, was certain to be dismissed as the ravings of a complete lunatic. Led to believe by the authorities that it was little more than a work of the devil (for what else, in their male eyes, could it be?), she burned the little octavo volume of divine light. She would leave Clyde and twelve children (including a newborn) a few years later in search of herself—but to no avail. In her final years, it must be said that she proved to be a slightly better grandmother than a mother, her relationships with most of her children and grandchildren strained at best, bordering on nonexistent for the most part. Still, all of her children ought to mourn her passing, not because of who she was, and least of all because of anything that might be confused with “mothering” or “nurturing” in the traditional sense. Who they/we are, in large part, is surely a consequence of all she attempted to do—good, bad, and ugly. “All’s well that ends well” is perhaps the best of all possible epitaphs in her case; either that or “Spare the rod, spoil the child,” which is only to say that Virginia Swasey Forsberg can--or ought to be--seen as a life that defies categories and belies description.