Mom’s Day honors
for Kalaupapa womenRose Marks and five others are
recognized in weekend tributes
KALAUPAPA, Molokai >> In the middle of Mass at tiny St. Francis Church yesterday morning, the prayers, briefly at least, were for Rose Silva Marks.It was a fitting Mother's Day remembrance for a woman so many here, in this former leper colony, considered mom.
Ten years after Marks' death, her life is finally gaining notice. Along with four other Kalaupapa women, she was honored Friday in a moving tribute at the National Women's Hall of Fame in upstate New York.
The Marks family name has frequently garnered attention, but it always came from Rose's son, Richard, a former leprosy patient who is now Kalaupapa's outspoken sheriff and a sort of spokesman for the peninsula.
Rose never endured the horrendous disease herself, but she watched as everyone around her was swallowed by it.
"One by one, she lost almost everybody close to her," said Richard Marks. "As a little girl, her mother, brother and sister were sent to Kalaupapa. Then her husband got sent away. Then she lost every one of her kids in just a few years."
"I've always said that my mother's the one they should write a book about," Marks said from his Kalaupapa home. "She's the one who went through it all. I was the lucky one."
Rose saw her family plucked away, but they say she did her best to continue to show her love. She penned letters often and saved her pennies for trips to Kalaupapa, twice-a-year week-long excursions.
On those trips, she was confined behind the chain-link fence at the caller house, her beloved family on the other side. Her visit was cause for celebration, not only for her sister, brother, husband and children, but for many in the settlement.
Her adherents say her stays were especially meaningful for Kalaupapa's children, who found in Rose a loving surrogate mother who knew all too well their anguished plight.
"Even though we couldn't be with her, she still kept the family together," said Winnie Marks Harada, a daughter who attended the New York ceremony. "Our family was torn apart, but because of my mother's love and sacrifice, we were still together. We were still a family."
Rose Marks was not the only Kalaupapa woman to be entered into the Hall of Fame's Book of Lives and Legacies.
Olivia Breitha, known for her 1988 book, "Olivia: My Life in Exile at Kalaupapa," was honored. So was accomplished craftswoman Cathrine Puahala and barkeep Elaine Remigio, who operates Elaine's Place, the only watering hole in Kalaupapa. And the hall also paid tribute to Anita Una, a member of the 1969 citizens panel that convinced the government to abolish its policy of isolating those people with the disease.
Outside Rose's former home, a humble Makawao dwelling, her grandson Francis Marks planned to tend to his grandmother's rosebushes yesterday.
"She just experienced all this loss, and still the love was there," he said.