The Life of M

Madelyne Adams Smith* died in her home in the Texas hill country, near Austin, on Saturday, July 19, 2066 after cliff diving for her seventy-fifth birthday. She was treated at Cornerstone Hospital in Austin for a concussion and three broken ribs but was discharged when she got up and walked out of her room with her hospital gown flapping in the breeze. She was surrounded at her deathbed by family and friends, who were throwing her a going-away party, per her request. Her last words before breathing her last were, “I always wanted to go out with a bang.” Immediately after her demise, a six piece jazz band played Mrs. Smith’s favorite song, Bewitched by Ella Fitzgerald. 

Mrs. Adams Smith was an interesting person from her very conception. Over her seventy-five years she wrote and published 28 novels, 86 short stories, three anthologies and one autobiography. She got her first tattoo on her nineteenth birthday and her last on her 74th. In 2020 she founded the publishing house, The Speckled Gecko, and ran it until her retirement in 2061 at the age of 70.

She spent her life interested in people and trying to cultivate that irresistibly fascinating type of personality you always wanted to remember and tell all of your friends about. She believed that her best work was done in the homes of strangers and was frequently making friends with people who lived in nice houses so that she might visit them for dinner and then lock herself in their bedrooms for an hour or so when she had writer’s block. She loved the outdoors and was well known for shouting, “That bitch’ll never get me!” when the topic of skin cancer came up in conversations and at random intervals in public. 

She is survived by her husband, John Doe Smith, her four siblings, Katherine Anne Adams Walters, Robert Calvin Adams, Hannah Elizabeth Adams Williams, Benjamin Paul Adams, her nine children, Theodore Noah Smith, Scarlett Elizabeth Smith Brown, Adele Charmane Smith Jones, Laurence Flynn Smith, Sophia Amelia Smith, Jack Richard Smith, Molly Jane Smith Johnson, Gerard Ferdie Smith, and Owen Blaise Smith, her forty-three grandchildren, and ten great-grandchildren.

Rosary services will be held Sunday evening at 5 p.m. at the home of the late Madelyne Adams Smith and funeral services have been arranged for Monday morning at 9 a.m. on a hillside near the Adams Smith estate. 

Her family would like to thank all of the friends, acquaintances and strangers who had ever had to put up with Mrs. Adams Smith and hope that you will forgive them and remember her as fondly as you are able but understand if you can’t.