Elisabeth “Lisi” Oliver introduced all of her friends as family. And it was these sons, daughters, cousins, brothers and sisters of Oliver’s that held back tears on Saturday as they gathered at The Club on the University’s campus to remember their adventurous, loving and easy-going best friend.
“If she loved you, she loved you utterly,” Jennifer Moses, one of Oliver’s friends, said.
Moses described Oliver as a sister, mother, cousin and fourth child who barged her way into her family’s life, presenting a gift that lasted a lifetime.
“Lisi loved family, and family had no boundaries in her eyes,” Matthew Oliver, Lisi Oliver’s nephew, said.
Oliver was an English professor at LSU, a cyclist, a musician, a dog lover and a role model for all who met her. She began her professional career at the Opera Company of Boston where she worked under renowned director Sarah Caldwell.
Like her personality, her life needed diversity. She left the opera and attended Harvard for a doctorate in linguistics. After graduating, Oliver found her way down to the Deep South and settled in Baton Rouge where she quickly began to bleed purple and gold.
She loved the Lady Tigers basketball team more than any fan at the PMAC. Her friend Allan Lenhardt said she was more than a fan; she was part of the team. He said Oliver made sure everyone knew LSU alumna Seimone Augustus was the best female basketball player to ever live.
Lenhardt recounted dinners with Oliver where she would ask for a sip of his martini, and when he told her to buy her own she would call him “Voldemort” and take a sip anyway with Lenhardt retorting “you old insufferable woman.”
As Lenhardt fought tears, he looked up from the podium and exclaimed “I hope you have a martini waiting for me in heaven, you old insufferable woman.”
On Sunday, June 7, Oliver was walking on the side of the road with her bicycle after training for her annual trip to participate in the Tour de France. A pickup truck came over a hill and struck the professor, killing her.
Gus Oliver, Lisi Oliver’s oldest brother, started his sister’s memorial service by reminding the crowd that his sister would not want her memorial to be an overly solemn occasion.
However, amongst smiles, laughs and tears, the memorial could be nothing but solemn, as friends and family remember the wonderful Cheshire cat’s grin on Oliver’s face that will only be a memory from here on out.
Norm Daoust described his friend as the kind who shoveled snow off their communal home’s long driveway in Cambridge even though she didn’t own a car.
While Oliver cycled and taught Old English at LSU, she also kept music close to her heart.
The remaining two members of her ukulele trio, No Spring Chicks, performed for the motley group of nearly 150 friends and family members.
Two years ago, Oliver joined the Baton Rouge Symphony Chorus. In her honor, the chorus performed Mozart’s “Ave Verum Corpus.”
Peter Oliver took the podium to end his sister’s memorial. He described a childhood of butting heads and an adulthood of a loving relationship with his sister. He closed with a prayer that his father recited at his mother and grandmother’s funeral:
“O Lord, support us all the day long, until the shadows lengthen and the evening comes, and the busy world lies hushed, and the fever of life is over, and our work is done. Then in thy mercy grant us a safe lodging, and a holy rest, and peace at the last.”