Fall festival

Falconbridge Fall Fiesta October 17 2009

Rosemary: Reflections

We are preparing for our second Fall celebration as a neighborhood community. Last year, 2008, we had an “art board” with large sheets of paper, for people to draw something and post it, sharing the instant art experience with others. Amid the drawings of houses, flowers, and trees that others attempted – pictures they’d learned in the past and then used each time that they were asked to “draw something,” Ellen hand wrote and then posted what turned out to be her last poem. A neighbor, Bill, kept trying to engage her in conversation. He was teasing her, and saying things just to get a rise out of her. Finally, she shushed him, and said “I HAVE to write this poem now!”

Many of the neighbors remember Ellen’s support and creative thinking behind our growing sense of community. Although she was ill much of the time after we moved here, she made a strong impression on our neighbors and our neighborhood. She was unfailingly supportive to me in my many activities to launch a stronger sense of community. I think she was proud of me for doing this, for working to enhance life in the neighborhood.

She deeply missed Manhattan, and the sense of community she had enjoyed there. She had already mourned losing the hospital as a community base. But she still felt strongly attached to the neighbors in her building, and to the Lesbian and Gay Community Center, of which she had been a founding board member. She said that The Center had literally saved her sanity after she and Jeannine had separated and she had felt so terribly alone and marginalized.

Suburbia in the South just didn’t have the pizzazz that would have helped her to feel at home. But she understood all too well the importance of being part of a caring community, and put her energy into supporting me as I strove to help create one, knowing it would be important for me after she had died. She was right!

I reread today the poem Ellen wrote last year, and wonder that it was a year ago – yet it also feels like another lifetime. It WAS another lifetime, another energetic realm.

Now, I’m well into the process of aligning my life after Ellen. I’m trying to learn the role that we continue to play with each other in this next chapter. Ellen’s become my Muse, my inspiration, my writing partner, and although she’s no longer my life partner in this physical lifetime, our relationship continues.

When two people have been as close as we became, the one who departed is still very present in the life and awareness of the other. It’s an intriguing dynamic – how to accommodate an ongoing but otherworldly relationship as part of a life that continues visibly without one of the partners present in this reality.

People routinely say that grief will never go away. The awareness of the beloved will never go away. Is that synonymous with “grief?” I wonder. How do people find another happiness while continuing to hold and honor a previous relationship? I haven’t found anything about how people have done this, although I’m sure they have. 

Experts writing about how to handle grief always focus on moving forward, putting the past behind. They just say "You will not forget your loved one."  But how the new life actually forms while the former relationship also evolves is not something I've found yet in the literature. The "experts" obviously have a very different view about this experience than people going through it themselves.


Rosemary: Redefining October 17, 2009


Our relationship was not complete.

It was a fascinating story,

I didn’t want to put it down, though it

Seemed it ended in the middle and

Left me wanting more.

Of course it’s not complete.

This life was just one chapter –

Just one season –

The cycles go on today and then today

Full of love and growing insight.

You’ve showed me that there’s so much more

To learn en route to bliss.