Deborah Barlow Tribute

I have known Bonnie and Gerald for 30 years. Bonnie and Gerald. Gerald and Bonnie. Those two names have been spoken in tandem in our house so many times that they have become a new word with no spaces in between.

But now we gather because that compound noun is no longer in present tense. We are here to remember and to praise the woman who has been starring in The Bonnie Chronicles, a 10 year running epic tale of a woman who just kept fighting her way past overwhelming medical obstacles and daunting outcomes. Her heroics became so mythic that a lot of us almost believed she would never lose to death.

Like all of us, Bonnie was a person with many dimensions and identities. Each of us today is bearing witness to the Bonnie we knew. I hope the portrait I paint of her rings true for many of you as well.


Bonnie was one of those people who everybody liked. Over the years I have known her, I have never heard anyone say a sour thing about her. She is the universal donor, the one person who could get along with everybody.

But lest you think that means she was just mild mannered and adaptable, I would have to argue emphatically, no. There was nothing doormattish about her. Oh no. Our Bonnie was full of paradoxes and surprises. I call it the Bonnie "and yet" factor.

For example: Bonnie had a softness about her. A calming, peaceful presence that everyone loved. Your edges were smoothed out just to be with her. And yet...she could also be fierce. Tough. Exacting. Like the way she approached her medication regimen. Or the way she made up her mind which, once made, was irrevocable.

She was a consummate listener and right up until the end had a remarkable memory. She could actually recall what you told her the last time you talked. And what's more, she cared. Whenever I was with Bonnie, her interest in me was so genuine that it was easy to believe that I was the most important person in the world. She treated me like I was. And yet...she could do that with every one of her many friends and still not have it come across as insincere or ingratiating because it wasn't insincere or ingratiating. She was genuinely interested in other human beings, of every stripe and size. Even with five children and a burgeoning family of grandchildren, she did not draw a line of demarcation between what is family and what is friends. When you were with Bonnie, you were in her cone of unconditional love for you, with no holding back.

Bonnie could do groups, and do them well. She was a member of the Mormon church. She was part of the team of women who published the journal Exponent II. She was part of the assemblage of people building Jack's Place out in western Vermont. She had her coworkers with Irene at the nursery school. She was part of a group of women friends who gathered together periodically and who, oddly enough, called themselves the Slugs. (I don't know the etymology of that name, but Gerald's guess at its acronymic meaning was memorable: Sexy Ladies Under Great Stress.) And yet...she never over identified with any of those groups. She was inclusive rather than exclusive, never drawing a line that left someone out.

Bonnie was modest and she did not like to draw undue attention to herself. I recently heard a story by way of Andrew Kimball from a few years ago, of her "tumbling from her sled at a church winter outing and gashing her rear end. Someone helping went to find Brother Cornish, a ward member in residency at Mass General, at which news poor Bonnie wept a tear. 'I don't want Devon Cornish to see my bottom.'" So see it he did not.

And yet...there was the famous weekend at Linda Othote's house when a group of us painted our breasts and then pressed them on to paper to make a gallery of breast prints. Bonnie was as winsomely topless and in wild abandon as the rest of us.

Bonnie had an Olympian ability to handle exceptionalism. You know, those extreme, extraordinary, sometimes difficult personalities, the people who come in somewhere way outside the normal distribution curve. Her closest friends included some of the most intellectually gifted, genius-level people I know. And yet... I have also seen her as engaged in meaningful conversation with the hospital phlebotomist or with a fellow cancer patient. She never shunned anyone. Ever. She could enjoy caviar as well as a Fenway frank.

She was a devoted Mormon and loved her religious heritage. And yet... that wasn't the only program she was watching. Her spirituality was ambient and open. She was willing to seek and to find the spirit in all sorts of circumstances--in a stone circle in Ireland where Judy, Sue and I performed a healing ritual for her during her first operation. Thousands of miles away, she saw the circles of light that we sent to her. Or she could find spiritual connection in a painting she loved, or in the meditation tapes she listened to during those painful bouts of chemotherapy. Or in her ancestral homeland of Romania where she traveled with Judy and Linda.

She admired reliability in others and exemplified it in her own life. She knew how to follow instructions and had great respect for protocol. And yet...she was also a rebel. She defied the male leadership of her ward when she and Laurel produced the now legendary Beginner's Boston, a guide book to the city that went on to become a local best seller. One of the last stories she told me a few days ago was about sitting on the back pew during church eating Oreo cookies with Tony Kimball. "I was a kook!" she declared proudly.

And being a "kook" was evidenced by her willingness to climb on board the adventurecraft also known as Gerald Horne. She was there at his side to participate in all of Gerald's improvisational pageants. The Gerald Horne Mystery School if you will. There was that celebration of Judy's 60th birthday, held in the Dushku back yard and carried out with wild pagan dancing, singing and abandon (while surreptitiously being observed by an incredulous Aaron Dushku and his wife Leni from inside the house. I'll never forget their faces which said, "People that old should NOT be having that much fun!")

Then there was the rebirthing ceremony for Cindy Barlow that included, among other things, diving gear for all of us in a local swimming pool, a red carpet walkway made from rose petals, and two doves released at an opportune moment into the wild. Yes, it was a bit awkward when the cops, called by a bewildered neighbor, showed up looking for an explanation.

And then there was the personal ritual to release our dear friend Sue from a painful past so she could begin her new life in Ireland. This performance, probably Gerald's piece de resistance, featured aboriginal costumes, a miniature version of Sue's Lexington house large enough for her to emerge from, a stone altar and a cauldron with fiery flames leaping above us, all of this assembled and conducted in the center of my painting studio in South Boston. These were some of Gerald's finest moments. And Bonnie, self-declared kook that she was, was right there at his side loving every minute of our collective mayhem.

Bonnie was unpretentious. She was a champion for the simple, and she found elegance in what was authentic. And yet... she was also a woman with a finely developed aesthetic sense. She took painting classes and her sense of color was extremely sophisticated. She filled her home with beautiful objects. Her gifts were always a reflection of that heightened visual sense. Her eye was sure and very sharp.

Bonnie respected a person's privacy. She listened rather than probed, and was very good at giving all of her friends the space they needed. And yet...I can't count the times she and Gerald showed up unannounced at our doorstep at the perfect moment, when we desperately needed the comfort of their companionship and love. She trusted her intuition to know when to cross that line.

Bonnie was a beautiful woman, and often on the way to the hospital she would struggle in her handbag to find her lipstick. Looking her best even when she was in excruciating discomfort was second nature to her. And yet...she was not vain. As her body failed her, she looked at her reflection in the mirror and shrugged with disbelief. At some point she accepted that you have to surrender to forces larger than your looks.

She admired efficiency, and until her illness forced her to step out of the logistical management of life, she was a paragon of how to get the job done. Mormonism is full of opportunities to test how quickly a person can pull together a lovely meal for 200, complete with table settings and flower arrangements. Oh, and did I mention, there's no budget for any of it. When I first arrived in Massachusetts from New York, Bonnie was the go-to gal. She was a fabulous cook but we know that quality alone could not carry the day. Her powers of organization, her calm under pressure, her ability to enlist the help of others and her mastery of making silk out of a sow's ear made her the perfect Commander in Chief for Event Planning in the Cambridge Ward.

And yet...she wasn't a tyrant, one of those people whose obsessive need for perfection drives everyone else away. She learned how to live with incompleteness, with less than perfect. This is life, she would tell me. It never ever is the way you want it to be, so accept it. It is over too quickly to miss out enjoying it "as is."

That is the kind of advice I craved from her. She was a few years older than me, so I watched her carefully and wanted to learn how she managed the complexity of her life. And it was complex. The list of learnings from her is a long one, but here are a few that mean the most to me.

• You can have exacting personal standards for yourself, but that doesn't allow you to judge others.

• You can strive for the high bar in your aesthetic and moral sensibilities, but keep the doorway tall and wide for the humans in your life.

• Being powerful does not mean being the noisiest person in the room.

• Your presence is your medicine, your gift to others.

• Listen to the spirit within you.

• Hold others' lives with sacredness and respect.

• Avoid the tendency to speak when you are emotionally overwrought. Err on the side of saying less, not more.

But the most memorable learning from Bonnie was that white hot, nearly blinding tenacity to hold on to life. I've never known anyone who battled with more courage and bravery than she did. She wanted to be here. She wanted another season with her beautiful grandchildren. She wanted to be in the rich, textured complexity of this river flow we call life.

Now that she is gone, we can all carry inside what we loved most about her. For me it is her driving will. When I face difficult challenges, it is Bonnie who I envision next to me. We all need a friend like that. We have that friend in her, and we always will.