Life is very long

“Life is very long” said T.S. Eliot at the ripe old age of 37. I wonder if he would have thought so, had he lived longer.

Life is, or can be, long if one considers the twists it takes, or the decisions made, or the mistakes. Long, too, taken in minutes or days. Even short lives are long in those terms.

But when one of us dies, especially a loved one, it can be much too short.

So it was with Eileen, a woman of years, a friend, a poet, a mother and grandmother, who died last week, ending a familiar battle with cancer, also long.

Eileen did not love easily, but fully. She did not suffer fools but was infinitely interested in you until you gave her reason not to be.

When we were introduced—“Eileen, do you know Cass Collins?”—she responded, “I’ve never heard of her before in my life,” with such flat honesty and challenge that she was endeared to me instantly and forever.

It did not take long for us to become friends. Years later, at a lunch at the Blue Horizon in Monticello, she said “ …because I like you... ” with the same flat honesty of that first meeting, and it became a pier on which I would rest in rough water.

In our writers group, Eileen was thoughtful and terse when it came to verse. A poem of mine was critiqued by the group with numerous penciled comments in the margins about structure and verbs, subject and style. Eileen’s comment was, “I liked it very much.” I took as much instruction from that as from all of the others.

Her own poetry evoked her voice so accurately that today I can read it and hear her reading it and see her full white head of hair, plainly cut in a page-boy bob, and her wry smile and piercing eyes. Did I mention her beauty, as powerful at 80 as at 20?

She had begun a regular exercise routine, two days a week at a local gym, the year before she became ill. Also, a new job. She told me she never felt so strong in her life, had muscles she never knew existed, and encouraged me—by example, not word—to follow her lead.

After a difficult childhood in Paterson, NJ, Eileen became a mother herself and raised three children, starting a Head Start program and a library in the process. She struggled to impart values that had been missing in her own family. We swapped tales of alcoholic fathers that were eerily similar.

At the end, her grandchildren spoke and sang at her funeral. The values she cherished—of love and curiosity and faith—shone their light through those children’s eyes.

The feminist movement of the ’70s found a willing participant in Eileen, but she was no sap when it came to politics. She studied the Iraq war and the Republican agenda of G.W. Bush thoroughly, to be sure she knew the stakes and the reasoning behind this new government before rejecting it. I still don’t know who she would have voted for in the next election. She was inscrutable when she wanted to be.

At her funeral, a son-in-law read a passage from the Kabbalah that sounded right. It told of the earth falling away in death, and the spirit ascending, free and strong and able to direct work on earth. If souls like Eileen’s are exercising their “higher power” for us, we can take comfort in that.

But Eileen would not have us rest easy. Life is, after all, very long.

- Cass Collins