Summer of love, summer of loss

Love and loss are eternal partners—if you have one, you will eventually have the other. This summer, the 40th anniversary of the “Summer of Love,” has brought more than its usual dose of loss for some of us.

There were two young eagles hatched from a local nest this June. My neighbors and I watched as they poked their scraggly-feathered heads up from their aerie, 90 feet above the ground. We tracked their first flights—first one, then weeks later, the other. We watched their parents catch fish for them, patiently showing them how to dive and catch, instilling the lesson of foraging for survival. We heard them squawking at each other from neighboring branches in some inscrutable language. In a neighborhood that has more grandchildren than children, they became our neighborhood kids.

Last week, one of them, grown so large in mere months that its wings outstretched those of its parents, got caught up in a power line and died. Now, the other one perches on a high branch near the nest and squawks for its lost sibling. Does it feel love? I don’t know, but it feels loss, I am sure.

This summer we lost Jean Kerrigan, an older woman beloved by a whole community; Bob Wasserman, a middle-aged man with a happy marriage, many talents and a passionate involvement in environmental issues; and most recently, young Logan Cemelli, a four-year-old felled by a mysterious and persistent fever.

Small-town life accentuates the everyday life and death cycle. There is no closed-door insulation that a large city can provide. Neighbors live in the open, maintaining a respectable distance until the joy of birth or shared sadness of death appears, to bond us.

Forty years ago this summer, I saw that truth in action for the first time as I watched a young man die at Max Yasgur’s farm, after being run over by a tractor as he slept in an open field. Strangers embraced and wept as his body turned blue, then gray before he could be airlifted out of the muddy sea of the Woodstock festival.

Within 24 hours those same strangers danced with joy at the announcement of the birth of a baby boy in those same fields. A generation that had bonded over ideals of love and peace met in a farmer’s field and became its own small town for a moment in time, feeling shared joy and grief, love and loss.

Maybe that’s why I feel so comfortable living here, only miles away from that storied event (although I would never characterize Woodstock the festival as “comfortable”—it was anything but!) The ideals of my generation, so easily dispatched in an anonymous city, are essential to life in a small town.

When Logan’s mom, Pam, received neighbors this week at a friend’s home in Narrowsburg, her son Alder played by a tipi with friends. His sisters worked quietly nearby, beading bracelets and talking. Townspeople brought food and cards for the family. Everyone was asked to wear something pink, as an expression of joy for Logan’s short but happy life.

When it came time to end the reception, a group of us walked to the river with balloons (biodegradable) and released them into the heavens, inscribed with messages for Logan. Alder’s message was as inscrutable to me as the eagles’ squawks, but as his balloon rose, he turned his head upward and his eyes appeared as deep and full as the eddy. His first brush with love and loss had come much too soon.

- Cass Collins