IN MEMORIAM Gewirtz was a tenacious fighter for social justice BY BRIAN C. JONES

I last spoke to Nancy Gewirtz a couple of days after the presidential election, and she was her old self.

She was distressed, of course, about President Bush’s reelection. But she was more interested in celebrating the dozens of smaller, progressive victories hidden by the national Republican tally. As always, she rattled off a long list: minimum wage referendums in Nevada and Florida, stem-cell research in California, "progressive" legislatures elected in Colorado, Oregon, and more. As we spoke, Gewirtz, 59, was dying. After years battling a persistent case of pancreatic cancer, she had less than two weeks left, and she and those around her knew it.

But Gewirtz was also dying to talk. I was doing a story for the Phoenix about what the Left would do in the wake of the election, and she wanted to get more than just a few points in. On the phone, her words were slightly slurred, as if she were medicated. But that old sunny trill was still in her voice, marking her excitement about being on the move to fix the world.

"I think what the Left has to do is also get out the message about morals," she said, tackling the claim that Republican had won the election on values. "Really, the Left has, I believe, the upper hand in understanding what really good morals are." Those Leftist values weren’t that "you believe my way or you’re a bad person," Gewirtz said. They were about religious tolerance, the right to dissent, the ability of families to have a secure life, and a society based on fairness.

I wasn’t surprised that Gewirtz would devote some of her precious last moments to talking politics and policy, the wonkish discussions you stumble across on C-SPAN and then hit the remote button fast.

For Gewirtz, these subjects were the stuff of her life, under-girding her faith that you can actually change things to improve people’s lives, and that the way you do it is to get down and dirty with the mind-numbing details: welfare time limits, Consumer Price indexes, income offsets, and income eligibility rules. And she did make things better. Thousands of Rhode Island mothers are better off today because Gewirtz fought to get welfare reform right in the 1990s. Taxpayers are in better shape, too, because people getting off welfare Gewirtz’s way have a decent chance of staying off.

She helped found the Poverty Institute at Rhode Island College’s School of Social Work as a liberal think tank to provide reliable, on-the-ground information about policies that work for poor families. She helped organize the One Rhode Island coalition, so progressives could present a unified agenda to the State House. Her objective was to do things that produce long-term, realistic solutions. So when the fatal cancer struck, Gewirtz chose to spend her remaining days in State House hearing rooms, over long policy meetings and coalition strategy sessions.

This was not an easy decision. She looked glamorously fit — sporting an outrageously deep tan on the theory that "What’s the worst too much sun can do? Kill me?" But the medical procedures that extended her life came with a gruesome personal cost.

"While I so want to live and am trying my hardest to stay alive, in truth the chemo is very hard without a stomach," she wrote in an e-mail last year. "I am now fed intravenously, and that is what is keeping me looking okay. Otherwise, I’d be out of luck, because eating is too difficult."

What made this worthwhile was the thrill she got knowing that she’d be around to attend yet another Finance Committee hearing, write more Providence Journal op-ed commentaries, issue the latest Poverty Institute report about how much income a family of four actually needs to stay afloat.

That last day we talked, she took particular pleasure in how her 27-year-old daughter, Rebekah Gewirtz, was up to her hip-boots in progressive politics in neighboring Massachusetts, where she and a coalition helped elect a young reform Democrat to the legislature. Gewirtz seemed to pick up energy as we talked, almost as if she was both answering my questions and making mental notes about what needed to be done next. "This is the wrong time to lose faith," she said. "You know, it’s very discouraging — we’re all sad about the election. But these are the times precisely when you don’t curl up in a ball and say, ‘Well, there’s nothing I can do.’ "