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Memorials: Mountain View Friends Meeting

Gholam Reza

Date of birth

Nov. 18, 1949*

Date of death

Jan. 1, 2021*

Meeting

Mountain View Friends Meeting
*Date(s) of birth and/or death approximate

Memorial minute

Gholam Reza was born in Iran on November 18, 1949. His mother, Mahsoltan Amiri, was of the Bakhtiari tribe of nomads, who raised livestock and migrated twice yearly between summer and winter grazing lands. His father, Ali Akbar Makvandi Ali Moradi, drove a supply truck on classified missions for the Russian army during and after WWII. Gholam Reza was the eldest of four siblings.

In pre-Revolution Iran, the Bakhtiari women were afforded unusual freedoms because their skill at weaving added significantly to the economy. Eric Smith recalled Mahsoltan, late in her life, showing him how to use a handheld spinning device she still had.

Gholam Reza attended university in Tehran, majoring in mathematics, but he loved all aspects of university life, including political discussions, classical music, literature, and the arts. He first came to the United States in 1976, to teach in Houston. He soon acquired citizenship, and after a few years moved to the Denver area, where he taught math briefly at Metro State and then found his career in teaching fourth graders in Denver Public Schools while also coaching them in chess, and organizing intramural chess tournaments.

Gholam Reza lived frugally in Denver, but never stinted on travel. He returned often to Iran, but visited friends too, in Europe and Australasia. He had agitated for the Revolution in Iran, but when it happened in 1979, he found the succeeding theocracy under the Ayatollahs to be worse than the authoritarianism under the Shahs.

About 2001, he suffered a traumatic brain injury in an auto accident while visiting Iran. The accident sadly had permanent effects. Gholam Reza had lost some of his higher cognitive functioning. He was able to remember the moves of chess pieces, for example, but could no longer devise strategies. It was a devastating blow that prevented him from teaching.

The later years of Gholam Reza’s life were spent in caring for his mother. For many years he had brought his mother to the U.S. for visits, generally about the time of Ramadan. Then, in about 2005, he sold his condo in Aurora, Colorado, and moved back to a small cottage in a Bakhtiari village in Southwestern Iran. He intended to live out his days there simply, indeed primitively, with his mother. The rest of the family objected strongly, however, and soon Gholam Reza returned to the U.S. and his mother moved to a younger son’s house in Tehran. But in Islamic culture it is the duty of the eldest son to care for aging parents. So when Gholam Reza proposed bringing his mother to Denver, the plan met with family approval. She arrived here in 2010 and never saw Iran again. And from that time Gholam Reza devoted his time to her care, which became ever more demanding as her ninth decade brought on increasing frailty and dementia.

Gholam Reza’s spiritual life was rich and complex. He delighted in the poetry of Hafiz and Rumi, face alight while reading it to friends aloud for the intonations of the ancient Farsi, and then freely translating to the English. The spiritual truths of these poems were of central significance to him. He attended Islamic services occasionally, at any of several mosques in the Denver area. For the past two decades he was a regular attender at Mountain View Friends Meeting. He appreciated the Quaker testimonies, of peace, integrity, community and equality, but especially of simplicity. When his mother could be entrusted to his friend Eric Smith’s care for a few days, Gholam Reza’s choice for R & R was often a spiritual retreat. He might go off to St. Benedict’s Cistercian Monastery in Snowmass, CO, or to another of the retreats of the Center for Contemplative Outreach, or for two or three days of silence as far afield as Australia or New Zealand.

But when Mahsoltan died, Gholam Reza chose to have her buried with the simple service of the local mosque. A few days later, suffering from COVID-19 and disconsolate, he took his own life, and was buried with the same simple service. A dozen hastily-invited members of the Meeting community attended the burial. More than forty came to a later virtual memorial meeting for both Mahsoltan and Gholam Reza at Mountain View Friends Meeting, for which Eric Smith provided a lively account of their life, with details that surprised many in attendance. From the many heartfelt vocal ministries, it was clear that Gholam Reza and Mahsoltan had had a greater impact on the lives of their friends in the Meeting than they knew.