I was one of the few students at school who loved studying statistics. All the knowledge that you learn about people is amazing.
But like many people, the parts of my life that are
the most exciting to me are those that don’t fit well into statistical
description.
One such extraordinary part of my life was my friendship
with Eleanor. When I met her, she was 85 years old and very sharp. A
part-scientist/part-painter with a PhD in English, Eleanor often went for walks
and spent a lot of time outdoors sitting on her walker observing nature. It was
during her daily jaunts that I began to spend time with her. We immediately hit
it off as we discovered that we both had a poetic appreciation of nature, and
we both loved art and science.
I met her on my own circuitous journey, which landed me a
job as an activity assistant in an assisted-living facility in Mississippi. My
wife, a native Mississippian, and I moved there from Seattle after we jumped
off of society’s escalator of pre-planned milestones to follow our own personal
goals. Within weeks of landing in small-town Mississippi, I was teaching a seated
version of Tai Chi to residents of the assisted-living home.
Those classes were well attended, particularly by two
residents, Franny,
whom I wrote about earlier, and Eleanor. There were many moments that the
three of us sat in Eleanor’s room when I felt like I was in a Samuel Beckett play. It was
during these occasions that I came to know that Eleanor did not think she “understood”
life but sought to understand it, like many of Beckett’s characters. This pursuit
of trying to understand life that we shared was probably brought on because of
traumas we had each carried like a heavy backpack on a long journey. But they
pushed us to explore life and compelled us to share notes about our own unique
journeys.
Often this sharing took place in her room where we would sit
for hours discussing philosophy, psychology, the arts, and anything that helped
us understand the trauma we had experienced. One of the things I loved about
Eleanor was that she engaged many people to share whatever they knew about life,
and a number of people visited her because of her openness to their experiences.
Often others would join in and we would have rich and unexpected conversations.
Some of those discussions included deeply religious people
who would tell us their take on the meaning of life, which usually involved
heavy dogma. This often disappointed Eleanor and annoyed me, as some people went
so far as to claim that my role in her life was to help her find Jesus. Independently,
Eleanor and I had come to the conclusion that there is no knowing, only seeking.
Eleanor and I couldn’t relate to those who claim to “know”
what life is about, like many religious people and statisticians. I believe as
people who had to walk with trauma, she and I didn’t have that feeling of
certainty about much in life. We lived in uncertainty and were caught in
between statistics and religion.
Five years after Eleanor’s death, I haven’t met anyone quite
like her, but I am still carrying my backpack and proudly upholding the values
that we shared. I looked up the origin of her name, and of its many possible
meanings, the one I think is most suitable to describe her is from the Latin
root of the verb lenire, “to soothe
or to heal.”
If anyone chooses to write about me after I die, I hope they
have as difficult a time as I had in conveying a glimpse of Eleanor.
