‘Everybody’s mom’: Zelda Keitt was known for grace, gratitude and faith in the good
There was something about Zelda Keitt.
Maybe it was her “quiet strength.” The way that she was “everybody’s mom.” Or that she was a hugger, a “smiler,” who always let you know she wasn’t holding back. She was the type of person that gave you hope for the good in people, friends and family say.
Zelda Keitt died on Jan. 22, at age 60, from pancreatic cancer. She was known for her unwavering faith and her three-decade career at Charlotte’s Arts & Science Council, where she ultimately served as the director of funds and pledge administration.
“She left everyone better than how she met them,” her daughter, Martie Bowser, said. “If you had a bad day she was going to do her best to try and fix it.”
‘She cared about people’
Keitt was raised in the tiny town of Forest City, the fifth of eight children in a family with a strong religious tradition.
“The house is actually down the street from the church,” Bowser said of Keitt’s mother’s house. “My grandmother could stand on the porch and watch you walk through the front door.”
Keitt moved to Charlotte in the late 1980s. After Martie was born, she started taking CPA and finance classes at the Urban League.
That eventually led her to a job in the Arts & Science Council’s fundraising department. Her first boss was Michael Marsicano, the civic-leader-in-the-making who would go on to lead the Foundation for the Carolinas.
“She definitely enjoyed the fact that what she was working with on the finance side was contributing to the art world,” Bowser said. “My mother was very proud of the work she did at the Arts & Science council.”
Keitt was in the council’s fundraising department, working as the primary point of contact for new donors, as well as the caregiver of their donations.
“She really understood that it was people that help us do this work,” said Krista Terrell, president of the Arts & Science Council. She’d often hear Keitt asking donors about their children, chatting like old friends.
She often brought young Bowser along to the office, who would sometimes nap under the desk while her mother worked. “I was the office kid for the longest,” she said.
At work, Keitt — “Z,” as colleagues called her — was known for her positive outlook, quiet strength and kindness, Terrell said. Keitt was the type to always say hello in the morning, to cite Proverbs in her employee self-evaluation or to make a younger colleague feel cared for after a mentor was laid off.
Keitt’s office was a refuge, Terrell said, a place of peace in a sometimes hectic work day.
“Hey Z,” Terrell would say, sinking into one of the chairs in front of her desk. “I just need a minute.”
“Take your time,” Keitt would say. “I’m here for you.”
While Terrell was serving as acting president at the ASC before permanently moving into the role last April, she got an out-of the-blue text from Keitt: “Your name popped up in my spirit,” it said. “I wanted to reach out and encourage you to continue on this path that God has placed you on. Stay strong and and true to who you are and who you belong to. Love you.”
Moments like that were “classic Z,” Terrell said. “She cared about people.”
Magic spoons and ‘making people feel heard’
Outside of work, Keitt loved reading, going to museums and organizing family gatherings.
She loved to learn and instilled it in her daughter, teaching Bowser to read when she was just 2 or 3 years old. They loved Discovery Place and other Charlotte museums.
Keitt also loved to laugh, and had a funny side underneath her calm demeanor. The first time Bowser heard her mother “lie” was at an office holiday party.
Keitt’s sister was working at a prepackaged food company that sold bags of overstocked chocolate chip cookies, fresh off the assembly line. Keitt bought a bag and brought them to the party.
The cookies were a hit, Bowser said. Everyone kept asking for the recipe. Keitt didn’t have the heart to tell them it was probably the same cookie they could order in a fast food restaurant.
Instead, she told them, the secret had to do with a special cookie-making spoon — “miraculous,” she called it — that had been passed down in her family through generations.
‘“I’m over here thinking — a magic spoon?” Bowser laughed. “Three hundred and sixty four days a year, she tells me not to lie! And this one day, she decides to lie about this spoon.”
Keeping her faith
Keitt stayed attached to her roots and maintained her faith through the final days of her life.
“She would still pray, still be her positive self, at a time where no one would have blamed her for being the other,” her daughter said.
Even in her final days at the hospital, Bowser said, her mother never showed frustration or anger: chatting with doctors and nurses, smiling and “making sure people felt heard.”
At the funeral service Jan. 29, Bowser wrote a letter to her mother that she read aloud: “I hope grace is hereditary,” it said.
“All my life, it was grace and gratitude,” she said. “The level she showed all my life was astounding to me.”
