In Memoriam: Emily Visher

By Jan Goldman

We lost Emily Visher on September 5, 2001, after a four and one half year bout with liver cancer. Emily died at her home in California, surrounded by her husband John and her large family of children and stepchildren. Emily had outlived all the predictions of time allotted to one with her illness, once again demonstrating the valiant spirit that characterized her to all who knew her. Emily met life head on with an energy that swept into the room along with her. She was a person with a mission and no time to waste. That energy found its expression in raising four children of her own and four children of John's in the stepfamily they formed together when they married over forty years ago. Out of the learning she and John did together, they formed the Stepfamily Association of America in their kitchen, so that the trail they blazed would be marked for others who would follow. And trail blazers they were! They put stepfamilies on the map and marked out the paths that others would have had to find by trial and error in life as a remarried family with children. They inspired other researchers and clinicians to enlarge the discourse. But most of all, they normalized what stepfamilies would go through so that people didn't internalize the inevitable breakdowns as their fault. They set out the norms for stepfamily life and differentiated them from first families, so that when the inevitable comparisons were made, stepfamilies wouldn't suffer in the comparison.

I first met Emily and John at AFTA one evening many years ago during the cocktail hour before a banquet. We struck up a conversation and ended up sitting together at dinner. That was the beginning of a long and wonderful AFTA friendship. Emily and John and Nick and I often had dinner together during the first night of an AFTA meeting after the keynote speaker had finished. We would often call them when we were in California and they would meet us for dinner, and we would continue the conversation as if we had just seen them last week. Emily and John were both so gracious and generous. Indeed it's hard to speak of just Emily or just John, because they were such a close couple. Their life at work or at play was lived very much together. They wrote together and traveled together and presented workshops together. It was from the solid ground of their relationship that they reached out to others with learning and friendship.

I remember sampling what they offered to other professionals when I attended their stepfamily interest group  at AFTA one year. Instead of the time usually spent going around and trying to focus on what the group's interest might be, Emily and John had designed an experience for us. They had us form into groups and discuss some topic or do some task; and when this was well underway, they interrupted each group on some pretext and said it was necessary for a given person to move to another group. The person so designated then moved. After the group continued and regained momentum, they interrupted again and said that the person who had moved now had to make a choice as to whether to stay with the new group or go back to their original group. In this way they showed us what children in divorced families or stepfamilies might go through when adults move the children around arbitrarily or fight and ask them to choose loyalties and sides. Just recently Scott Browning told me that this exercise was Emily's innovation. I thought of it often through the years. I think of it now because I have a young girl in treatment currently who is in just this position. Emily trained my "gut" in that long ago exercise, showing me what it felt like and increasing my empathy. I'm counting on it to help in my work with this young adolescent caught in a custody battle with her warring parents. Emily, you are still in my thoughts.

I could cite the many accomplishments Emily had to her credit: the books she wrote together with John such as How To Win As a Stepfamily published in 1978, and addressed to the lay public, or the training materials she and John developed for other professionals, Stepping Together, a guide to stepfamily life. I could cite her many presentations at conferences to further the cause of stepfamily education and legitimacy. Or the awards of recognition bestowed by the many organizations with which she was affiliated.  But perhaps the greatest tribute to her work and to John's is the fact that others now carry it on in the Stepfamily Association of America. As stepfamilies are recognized for the increasingly dominant form that they are in the medley of American families, it is Emily Visher and her beloved John, who through their work and dedication that have made their journey so much easier.

Jan Goldman, Psy.D. is in private practice in Jenkinstown, PA. She is a charter member of AFTA, and formerly headed up the family therapy training to child psychiatry residents at Hahnemann University.