🌳 TREE 748: A life remembered

If you have followed me online for a decent amount of time, you know that I’m a John Michael Greer fan. His insights into where we (society, species, planet) are and where we are headed are profound. Although I don’t embrace Greer’s spirituality and my politics are significantly different than his, I think I’ve learned more from him over the past 15 years than anyone outside my immediate family.

Last week, his wife died after a long illness. He wrote an essay remembering her life that was so honest and tender that I’m going break the format and share it with you. It starts like this:

The novelist John Gardner, author of Grendel, wrote somewhere that every marriage is a little civilization, and the end of a marriage is the fall of the civilization. He was reflecting on a bitter divorce, but it’s just as true of a marriage that really does last “until death do you part.” Memories, jokes, habits, shared interests, all the little ways that two people can weave their lives together—all those lose most of their meaning once one of the participants is gone. As the saying goes, you had to be there, and nobody else was.

Still, I want to make the attempt.

Sara and I met in the spring of 1982 in Bellingham, Washington, where both of us were attending college. I was a student at Fairhaven College, one of the last bedraggled remnants of the 1960s free-learning fad, and she was enrolled at Western Washington University, the state institution to which Fairhaven was a mostly unwelcome appendage. We had mutual friends; we heard about each other before we met; there was no particular chemistry in our first interactions, though I thought she was pleasant enough: plump, intelligent, and bookish, all of which have always rated high with me. Then one school year ended and another started up, she and two other girls agreed to rent a house together, and they needed a fourth person to share the bills. A couple of other prospects fell through, they invited me, and I accepted.

Of such stray incidents are destinies made. Three nights after I moved in, Sara and I stayed up talking about favorite science fiction novels after the other two had gone upstairs…

Every now and again The New Pornographers make something wonderful.

Grow slowly
Jeff