The line comes from Steven Sondheim's song, "Pretty Women" from the musical, "Sweeney Todd". "Proof of Heaven, while you're living. Pretty women." Appropriately, Sweeney coins it, singing, as we in the audience know, about the love of his life who is lost to him forever.
Karen Beth Hunter was far more than a pretty woman -- she was beautiful and brilliant, exciting and honest, and boldly loving, even if this meant being vulnerable to people who might, and often did, hurt her. She WAS very much "proof of heaven." In fact, she believed in god and the eternity of the soul so I am sure she would be/is glad to know that she affirmed their possibility in her very existence. Shortly after she passed away, a friend of mine, who is not given to paltry sentiment, wondered if she were my guardian angel and said, "She looked like one." My friend meant it.
This isn't to say she was conventionally "angelic". Like my cat Larry, whom she loved, she got as close to you as possible by asserting the truth. The truth wasn't always gentle or bucolic. It was beautiful because it was as essential as breathing. When something is wrong or he is very angry, Larry will kick things up and howl. Karen would get all red and do much the same. She couldn't stomach unfairness and I was to put things right or cause her tremendous pain and sadness. I'm afraid I did that a lot. Like Larry, she held that sadness in and it turned into anxiety. She told me once that she felt like Gumby because she had to twist into so many shapes to fit so many people's viewpoints/needs -- especially, I think, in her office. I used to joke that she was becoming, "America's Favorite Lesbian" because she counseled so many people who viewed her as a mother-figure, but were extremely homophobic (and had no idea about her sexuality).
I have never seen anyone be made so happy, however, by honest feeling and pure warmth. A good meal. Odetta. Irish music. Bachata music. Bicycling on a beautiful day. Clear, pure water. Feelings full, rich and pulsating. Love at its most elemental and finest. Brushing the hair from my face and caressing the stray silver in the strands of brown. Seeing beauty in details of me when it is not yet in the whole of me.
The paradox for me these past three years has been that nothing destroyed my faith in everything more than Karen's death and nothing affirmed my willingness to believe more than her life. She wasn't just "proof of heaven," but proof of earth -- and selfishly my ability to be a whole functioning person on it. She remains my "proof of heaven" and it's wondrous complexity. Like Sondheim's Sweeney, I feel cheated and the bitterness has transformed me, but I try, for her sake, not to let it do so as much as it could.
November 23rd is Karen's birthday and she would have been 57. In my mind, she was eternally 7 years old and I told her so. She was that child on the swing, going too high and too fast in pure exhiliration. In flight. She is still flying. And I am eternally 10 years old. My bicycle and my favorite coat no longer quite fit. My mother's loneliness has overpowered me and I no longer play outside. I guarded my 7 year old friend in the hopes that I can save her from this fate, but alas I could not save her at all. She reminded me of every pure joy I'd ever had and she was all of them at once. "Proof of Heaven" in a world where laughter without irony, without fear, that rises like unbridled passion from the belly upward is so, so rare. In a world in which the concept of goodness is often used to propulgate the very opposite, she was proof that true "heaven" is maddeningly, enchantingly and honestly beautiful.
No comments:
Post a Comment