Her mother was Frances Lucille Conner and her father was Thomas H. Switzer.

She was born into a family of two siblings: Kristina, the eldest girl; and her brother, Fritz. Then I was born eleven months after Lisa. She and I were Irish twins. Five years later, came our baby brother, Kelly. So it was the five of us who grew up together in a middle class home in a middle class town in the middle of the Midwest.

 

She and I would sit on the floor of our bedroom, reading liner notes on album covers in the 1960s. We wore pink, foam-rubber curlers in our hair and our pajama bottoms rarely matched the tops. We listened to the Beatles and the Monkees. Lisa loved John Lennon. And Paul McCartny was my imaginary date.

 

"I'm going to change the world and make it a better place," she would say. I always knew this about her. She cared about others. She read the Diary of Ann Frank and cried.

 

 

In high school, she was an A student. She was the smart one and I got to be the slut.

 

She graduated from Indiana University with her Bachelor of Arts degree in Sociology. She was thin and beautiful during her college years and she dated some of Bobby Knight's finest basketball players.

 

 

During our childhood, there would be times of turmoil in the house. With her upbeat, positive attitude; she would say, "This will make us stronger when we grow up."

 

Indeed, during her six-month long illness, she exhibited that learned strength and she remained positive and upbeat throughout her ordeal.

 

 

 

Since high school, she has dragged me along with her to work on various campaigns. I was conned into canvassing and working phone banks early on. She managed several campaigns and got her Masters in Political Science from the University of New Orleans in 2002.

 

 

We visited Lisa during Mardi Gras of 1996. She lived in a cute apartment in the warehouse district of New Orleans and walked to work at Bryant Jupiter, a predominately black law firm.

 

While working full-time, she went back to school and earned her Masters in Political Science.

She proceeded to go out and change the world for a while. She pretty much took a vow of poverty, shunning lucrative paralegal positions in favor of low-paying campaign management jobs or organizing for unions like the SEIU where she was fired for organizing its workers into a union.

In addition to numerous state, local and Congressional campaigns, she worked full-time on the Dean for America campaign, America Coming Together (ACT) and Iraq Summer, A coalition of anti-war organizations united in the summer of 2007. In the Chicago area she worked on the James Cappleman for 46th Ward Alderman, Richard Auman for 16th District US Congress and John Laesch for 14th District US Congress campaigns.