Grief

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity (2007)

  1 National Transgender Advocacy Coalition, “Araujo Murder Trial Scheduled to Begin April 5,” press release, March 2004 (https://web.archive.org/web/20050103231611/http://portland.indymedia.org/en/2004/03/284303.shtml); Kelly St. John, “Defense in Araujo Trial Gives Final Argument: Slaying Wasn’t Premeditated, Lawyers Say, Fighting for Manslaughter Verdict for Clients,” San Francisco Chronicle, June 3, 2004; Michelle Locke, “Prosecution Star Witness Testifies in Transgender Killing Case,” Associated Press, June 7, 2005. In a retrial, two of Gwen’s killers were charged with second-degree murder, and the other two took plea bargains to voluntary manslaughter (https://web.archive.org/web/20070711173215/www.transgenderlawcenter.org/gwen/index.html).2 Raymond, The Transsexual Empire, 104.3 Roughgarden, Evolution’s Rainbow, 93–99.4 Jay Leno questioned Hugh Grant after Grant had allegedly solicited a prostitute who was rumored to be transgender; reported in Nadine Brozan, “Chronicle,” New York Times, July 11, 1995.5 Patrick Califia, “Sex with an Imperfect Stranger,” Good Vibes Magazine, December 9, 2002 (https://web.archive.org/web/20230724122106/https://www.juliaserano.com/archive/GoodVibes-Califia-Araujo-article.pdf).14 Trans-Sexualization

• From The Chronology of Water (2011)

  So I told her. And begged her. She whipped my breasts. She whipped my stomach. My hipbones. Late into the day. I did not make a sound, though I wept a cleansing. Oh how I cried. The crying of something leaving a body. And then she whipped me red where my shame had been born and where my child had died, and I spread my legs as far as I could to take it. Even my spine ached. Afterwards she would cradle me in her arms and sing to me. And bathe me in a bubble bath. And dress me in soft cotton. And bring me dinner in bed with wine. Only then would we make love. Then sleep. Ten years to bring a self back. In between seeing her I swam in the U of O pool. I swam in the literature of the English Department. In water and words and bodies. My safe word was “Belle.” But I never used it. My Mother Demonology IN THE END, THE BOOKS I LOVED THE MOST IN GRADUATE school were the deviant ones. The underbelly of literature. George Bataille and the Marquis de Sade and Dennis Cooper and William Burroughs. Which makes it easier to understand how I found a literary foremother in Kathy Acker. So if you’ve never read Kathy Acker’s books, then you don’t know how often fathers rape their daughters. Without artifice or affect. Without any literary strategy to lyricise or symbolize or otherwise disguise. A father will show up on a page and rape his daughter, and the daughter will be the one narrating, and she will not be in any kind of victim position you’ve ever imagined. You’ll be reading going, mother of god, that’s some horrific shit, but the daughter won’t be. The daughter narrating the rape by her father will be extremely articulate even if coarse, and the narration will be the jumping off point for radical adventures of a girl child or robot woman or she-pirate. Her rage will drive her. The transgression will write her very body. When other people I knew in grad school read Kathy Acker’s books they were shocked. Appalled. Particularly most of the budding young feminists. I actually began weeding out women friends by their reactions to her books. The ones that smiled and lowered their eyes with sly understanding and touched themselves, I kept. The ones that freaked out, well, they were idiots. Once I read a paragraph from Empire of the Senseless in my theory of gender class and one of the women began to cry and ran out and barfed. No shit. Pussy, I thought. When I read Kathy Acker’s books, and particularly any section in which fathers sexually molested or raped or dominated or humiliated or shamed or abused daughters, all I went was yes. I did not feel shocked. I did not feel appalled. I felt … present.

• From The Chronology of Water (2011)

  That’s the picture I would show you - the way my sister looked through the window of the Simca station wagon. Her cheeks like apples. Her eyes puffy. My father had a hold of her arm. She looked like her legs didn’t work right. My mother rolled the window down and I saw snot under my sister’s nose. Was she crying? She did not make any sound. But she shivered. Then my sister looked straight at me. I bit my lip. Her eyes more cold than snow. That’s the picture. I remember the ride home. The long silence. To my knowledge, we did not bring home a tree. But we did bring home everything that was our family, laden. So laden. Ash DEAD INFANTS DON’T GET URNS UNLESS YOU PAY FOR them - and then they stuff crap in besides just ashes to cover the smallness. All those years ago? My daughter’s ashes were in a small pink box - pink for girls - a box the size of a hacky sack ball that fits in the palm of your hand I took my box to Heceta Head. The coast at Heceta Head in December is epic. Me, my first husband, my sister, and weirdly, my parents. Near strangers. Pretending to be a family, we stumble-walked down over the rocks to the water’s edge. The sound of ocean waves is large enough to stop your thinking. My mother closed her eyes and said a prayer in a southern drawl. Phillip sang I See the Moon - the lullaby my mother sang to me as a child - which made me feel a little like I might faint. My sister read “Ample Make This Bed” by Emily Dickinson, nearly killing us all. Then my father, the architect, pulled something out of his pocket. A folded up piece of paper. On it, he’d written a poem. Sort of. It rhymed. When he read it, his voice shook. The only time in my life I heard that. It rained cold. Windy. Like Oregon is. After that, Phillip and I took the little pink box which I had been clutching in my hand hard enough to nearly crush it and walked over to where the river joins the ocean. That’s why I’d picked that spot. I could see river rocks leading into the sea and sand, and I smelled and tasted saltwater. I don’t know if I was crying - my face was wet with ocean and rain. The lighthouse stood guard. All the waters of a life met at that tiny nexus. Then I handed him the fragile little box. He took it in his hand. I said, throw it as far as you can. So he - there isn’t another way to say this. He chucked it.

• From The Sex-Starved Marriage: Boosting Your Marriage Libido: A Couple's Guide (2003)

  I asked Dennis, “What’s that like for you when Lanie says no so often?” And he responded, “It hurts. I feel rejected. I don’t feel attractive or wanted by her, and that really hurts my feelings. I try to brush the bad feelings aside, and sometimes I can, but it’s really hard because I don’t feel good about myself.” Before I could shift gears and ask Lanie what she thought of what Dennis had said, I noticed she was crying. She grabbed Dennis’s hand and looked him in the eye and told him, “I feel so bad. Not once, not a single time when I turn you down, do I ever think about your feelings. I’m only in touch with what I’m feeling at the moment. I never think about you, how you might be reacting or what it’s like to be you. Dennis, I am so, so very sorry. I feel terrible.” Dennis cried. I cried too. But I can only speak for myself. My tears were not just of sadness; they were about optimism for the future. I know firsthand what can happen in marriages when spouses really listen to each other. I know how empathy and understanding can transform lives. And in that moment I shared with them, I bet my life that Lanie and Dennis would experience such a transformation in the months that followed. And I’m not a gambling woman. • Feelings aren’t right or wrong. They just are. No matter how divergent your views are about sex, unless you or your spouse is doing something illegal or hurtful, there is no right or wrong way to think or feel about it. Some people really enjoy watching X-rated videos, while others find the thought upsetting. Some people like to play out kinky fantasies, while more inhibited people would find these sexual role plays weird or distasteful. There are few universal rules about satisfying sex. Nonetheless, when you’re married to someone who enjoys things you dislike (or vice versa), it creates challenges for your relationship. You need to find ways to compromise, to meet in the middle. When I do couples’ seminars, it often strikes me how rigid couples are when it comes to problem solving. They tend to see things in black or white. It’s either my way or his or her way, and they end up feeling angry and distant. When I listen to their dilemmas, I can almost always see the gray areas. My vision is rarely black and white. Even when people’s positions are far apart, I never see them as mutually exclusive. Some solutions or compromises require more creativity than others, but I usually believe that with determination and a little elbow grease, we can find a win-win resolution. Here’s an example.

• From Wild (2012)

  “Yes,” I said, oddly flattered that I appeared that way to her, in spite of my filth and stench. “Or I used to be. I graduated four years ago,” I said, and then took another bite of food, realizing it was technically a lie. Though I’d promised my mother in the last days of her life that I would finish my BA, I hadn’t. My mother had died on the Monday of our spring break and I’d returned to school the following Monday. I’d staggered my way through a full load of classes that last quarter, half blind with grief, but I did not receive my degree because I’d failed to do one thing. I had not written a five-page paper for an intermediate-level English class. It should have been a breeze, but when I tried to start writing, I could only stare at my blank computer screen. I walked across the stage in a cap and gown and accepted the little document baton that was handed to me, but when I unrolled it, it said what I knew it would: that until I finished that paper, I would not have my bachelor’s degree. I had only my college loans, which, by my calculations, I’d be paying off until I was forty-three. The next morning Frank left me at a convenience store on the highway after instructing me to catch a ride to a town called Ridgecrest. I sat on the front porch of the store until a guy who distributed chips came along and said yes when I asked him for a ride, in spite of the fact that it was against company rules to pick up a hitchhiker. His name was Troy, he told me once I’d climbed into his big truck. He drove around southern California five days a week, delivering bags of chips of all varieties. He’d been married to his high school sweetheart for seventeen years, since he was seventeen. “Seventeen years out of the cage, and seventeen years in,” he joked, though his voice was raw with regret. “I’d do anything to trade places with you,” he said as we drove. “I’m a free spirit who never had the balls to be free.”

• From Open (2009)

  I make a pile of essentials: clothes, blender, Jamaican coffee beans, French press—and a gift Brooke recently gave me. The scary painting Philly and I saw years ago at the Louvre. She commissioned an artist to make an exact replica. I look at the man hanging from the cliff. How has he not fallen off that cliff by now? I throw everything in the backseat of my car, a mint-condition convertible Eldorado Cadillac, 1976, the last year they made them. The car is a pure lustrous white, lily white, so I named it Lily. I turn Lily’s key, and the dashboard lights come on like an old TV set. The odometer reads 23,000 miles. It strikes me that Lily is the exact opposite of me. Old, with low mileage. I peel out of the driveway. A mile from the house I start crying. Through my tears, and the gathering fog, I can barely see the chrome wreath of the hood ornament. But I keep going, and going, until I reach San Bernardino. The fog is now snow. The pass through the mountains is closed. I phone Perry and ask him if there’s another way to Vegas. What’s wrong? I tell him. Trial separation, I say. We don’t know each other anymore. I think about the day Wendi and I broke up, when I pulled over and phoned Perry. I think of all that’s happened since—and yet here I am, pulled over again, phoning Perry with a broken heart. He says there’s no other way to get to Vegas, so I need to make a U-turn, head back toward the coast, and stop at the first motel that has a room. I drive slowly, picking my way through the snow, the car spinning and skidding on the slick highway. I stop at every motel. No vacancy. Finally I get the last available bed at a fleabag in Nowhere, California. I lie on the smelly bedspread, interrogating myself. How the hell did you get here? How did it come to this? Why are you reacting like this? Your marriage is far from perfect, you’re not even sure why you got married in the first place, or if you ever wanted to get married—so why are you such an emotional wreck thinking it might be over? Because you hate losing. And divorce is one tough loss. But you’ve suffered tough losses before—why does this one feel different? Because you don’t see any way that, as a result of this loss, you can improve. I PHONE BROOKE TWO DAYS LATER. I’m contrite, she’s hardened. We both need time to think, she says. We shouldn’t talk for a while. We need to go inside ourselves, not interfere with each other. Inside ourselves? What does that even mean—for how long? Three weeks. Three? Where do you come up with that number? She doesn’t answer. She suggests I use the time to see a therapist.

• From Wild (2012)

  [image file=image_rsrc2VM.jpg] By the time the young women pulled their van over to the side of the narrow highway, the tall trees that lined the road almost entirely blotted out the setting sun. I thanked them for the ride and looked around as they drove away. I was standing next to a forest service sign that said WHITEHORSE CAMPGROUND. The PCT was just beyond it, the women had told me as I’d climbed out of their van. I hadn’t bothered to look at my map as we drove. After days of constant vigilance, I was tired of checking the guidebook and checking again. I’d simply enjoyed the ride, lulled by the women’s confidence that they knew where they were going. From the campground they said I could hike a short trail that would take me up to the PCT. I read the fresh pages that I’d ripped from my guidebook as I walked the paved loops of the campground, straining to see the words in the dying light. My heart leapt with relief when I came across the words WHITEHORSE CAMPGROUND, then it fell when I read on and realized I was nearly two miles away from the PCT. The words “just beyond it” had meant something different to the women in the van than they did to me. I looked around at the water spigots, the sets of brown outhouses, and the big sign that explained how one should go about paying for a spot for the night by leaving money in an envelope that should then be deposited through a slot in a wooden box. Aside from a few RVs and a smattering of tents, the campground was eerily empty. I walked another paved loop, wondering what to do. I didn’t have money to pay to camp, but it was too dark to walk into the woods. I came to a campsite on the very edge of the campground, the one that was farthest away from the sign detailing how to pay. Who would even see me? I set up my tent and cooked and ate my dinner in luxury on the picnic table with only my headlamp to light my way and peed in perfect comfort in the pit toilet, and then got into my tent and opened up The Novel. I’d read perhaps three pages when my tent was flooded with light. I unzipped my door and stepped out to greet the elderly couple who stood in the blinding headlights of a pickup truck. “Hi,” I said tentatively. “You need to pay for this spot,” the woman barked in response. “I need to pay?” I said, with false innocence and surprise. “I thought only people who had cars had to pay the fee. I’m on foot. I just have my backpack.” The couple listened in silence, their wrinkled faces indignant. “I’ll be leaving first thing in the morning. By six at the latest.” “If you’re going to stay here, you need to pay,” the woman repeated.

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  Suddenly a joy came to me: if Christianity was all lies and fairy-tales like Mahometanism, then the prohibitions of it were ridiculous and I could kiss and have any girl who would yield to me. At once I was partially reconciled to my spiritual nakedness: there was compensation. The loss of my beliefs was for a long time very painful to me. One day I told Stackpole of my infidelity and he recommended me to read “Butler’s Analogy” and keep an open mind. Butler finished what the West Indian had begun and in my thirst for some certainty I took up a course of deeper reading. In Stackpole’s rooms one day I came across a book of Huxley’s Essays; in an hour I had swallowed them and proclaimed myself an “agnostic”; that’s what I was; I knew nothing surely, but was willing to learn. I aged ten years mentally in the next six months: I was always foraging for books to convince me and at length got hold of Hume’s argument against miracles. That put an end to all my doubts, satisfied me finally. Twelve years later, when studying philosophy in Goettingen, I saw that Hume’s reasoning was not conclusive but for the time I was cured. At midsummer I refused to be confirmed. For weeks before, I had been reading the Bible for the most incredible stories in it and the smut, which I retailed at night to the delight of the boys in the big bedroom. This year as usual I spent the midsummer holidays in Ireland. My father had made his house with my sister Nita wherever Vernon happened to be sent by his Bank. This summer was passed in Ballybay in County Monaghan, I think. I remember little or nothing about the village save that there was a noble series of reed-fringed lakes near the place which gave good duck and snipe shooting to Vernon in the autumn. These holidays were memorable to me for several incidents. A conversation began one day at dinner between my sister and my eldest brother about making up to girls and winning them. I noticed with astonishment that my brother Vernon was very deferential to my sister’s opinion on the matter, so I immediately got hold of Nita after the lunch and asked her to explain to me what she meant by “flattery.” “You said all girls like flattery. What did you mean?” “I mean”, she said, “they all like to be told they are pretty, that they have good eyes or good teeth or good hair, as the case may be, or that they are tall and nicely made. They all like their good points noticed and praised.” “Is that all?” I asked. “Oh no!” she said, “they all like their dress noticed too and especially their hat; if it suits their face, if it’s very pretty and so forth.... All girls think that if you notice their clothes you really like them, for most men don’t.”

• From Love's Executioner and Other Tales of Psychotherapy (1989)

  Her death, Penny said, was awful—I couldn’t imagine how awful. At this point she started to sob. True to my word to ask hard questions, I urged her to tell me about how awful Chrissie’s death had been. Penny had wanted me to get her started; and, by sheer chance, my first question unleashed a torrent of feeling. (Later I was to learn that I would reach deep pain in Penny no matter where I probed.) Chrissie had died, finally, of pneumonia: her heart and lungs had failed; she couldn’t breathe and, in the end, drowned in her own fluids. The worst thing, Penny told me between sobs, was that she couldn’t remember her daughter’s death: she had blacked out Chrissie’s final hours. All she remembered was going to sleep that evening alongside her daughter—during Chrissie’s hospitalizations Penny slept on a cot next to her—and, much later, sitting at the head of Chrissie’s bed with her arms around her dead daughter. Penny began to talk about guilt. She was obsessed with the way she had behaved during Chrissie’s death. She could not forgive herself. Her voice became louder, her tone more self-accusatory. She sounded like a prosecuting attorney trying to convince me of her dereliction. “Can you believe,” she said, “I can’t even remember when, I can’t remember how I learned my Chrissie had died?” She was certain, and soon convinced me she was correct, that the guilt about her shameful behavior was the reason she couldn’t let Chrissie go, the reason her grief had been frozen for four years. I was determined to pursue my research plans: to learn as much as possible about chronic bereavement and to design a structured interview protocol. Nonetheless, possibly because there was so much therapy to be done, I found myself forgetting the research and, little by little, slipping into a therapeutic mode. Since guilt seemed to be the primary problem, I set about, for the rest of the two-hour interview, learning as much as possible about Penny’s guilt. “Guilty of what?” I asked. “What are the charges?” The main charge she brought against herself was that she had not been really present with Chrissie. She had, as she put it, played a lot of fantasy games. She had never allowed herself to believe that Chrissie would die. Even though the doctor had told her that Chrissie was living on borrowed time, that no one had ever recovered from this disease, even though he said, point-blank, when she last entered the hospital, that she could not live much longer, Penny refused to believe that Chrissie would not get well again. She was full of fury when the doctor referred to the final pneumonia as a blessing that should not be interfered with.

• From Wild (2012)

  When I went home one day to visit Eddie in early December nearly three years after my mother died, I was shocked by how thin and weak Lady had become. She was nearly thirty-one, old for a horse, and even if nursing her back to health had been possible, no one was around enough to do it. Eddie and his girlfriend had begun splitting their time between the house where I’d grown up and a trailer in a small town outside the Twin Cities. The two dogs, two cats, and four hens we’d had when my mother died had either died themselves or been given away to new homes. Only our two horses, Roger and Lady, remained. Often, they were cared for in the most cursory way by a neighbor whom Eddie had enlisted to feed them. When I visited that early December, I talked to Eddie about Lady’s condition. He was belligerent at first, telling me that he didn’t know why the horses were his problem. I didn’t have the heart to argue with him about why, as my mother’s widower, he was responsible for her horses. I spoke only about Lady, persistent about making a plan, and after a while he softened his tone and we agreed that Lady should be put down. She was old and sickly; she’d lost an alarming amount of weight; the light in her eyes had faded. I’d consulted with the veterinarian already, I told him. The vet could come to our place and euthanize Lady with an injection. That, or we could shoot her ourselves. Eddie thought we should do the latter. We were both flat broke. It was how horses had been put down for generations. It seemed to both of us a strangely more humane thing to do—that she’d die at the hands of someone she knew and trusted, rather than a stranger. Eddie said he’d do it before Paul and I returned for Christmas in a few weeks. We wouldn’t be coming for a family occasion: Paul and I would be in the house alone. Eddie planned to spend Christmas at his girlfriend’s place with her and her kids. Karen and Leif had plans of their own too—Leif would be in St. Paul with his girlfriend and her family, and Karen with the husband she’d met and married within the span of a few weeks earlier that year. I felt ill as Paul and I pulled into the driveway a few weeks later, on the afternoon of Christmas Eve. Over and over again, I’d been imagining how it would feel to look out to the pasture and see only Roger. But when I got out of the car, Lady was still there, shivering in her stall, her flesh hanging from her skeletal frame. It hurt to even look at her. The weather had turned brutally cold, breaking records with lows that hovered around 25 degrees below zero, with the wind chill plunging the temperature colder still.

• From Wild (2012)

  It took me years to take my place among the ten thousand things again. To be the woman my mother raised. To remember how she said honey and picture her particular gaze. I would suffer. I would suffer. I would want things to be different than they were. The wanting was a wilderness and I had to find my own way out of the woods. It took me four years, seven months, and three days to do it. I didn’t know where I was going until I got there. It was a place called the Bridge of the Gods. 2 SPLITTINGIf I had to draw a map of those four-plus years to illustrate the time between the day of my mother’s death and the day I began my hike on the Pacific Crest Trail, the map would be a confusion of lines in all directions, like a crackling Fourth of July sparkler with Minnesota at its inevitable center. To Texas and back. To New York City and back. To New Mexico and Arizona and Nevada and California and Oregon and back. To Wyoming and back. To Portland, Oregon, and back. To Portland and back again. And again. But those lines wouldn’t tell the story. The map would illuminate all the places I ran to, but not all the ways I tried to stay. It wouldn’t show you how in the months after my mother died, I attempted—and failed—to fill in for her in an effort to keep my family together. Or how I’d struggled to save my marriage, even while I was dooming it with my lies. It would only seem like that rough star, its every bright line shooting out.

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  ORIGEN. Or, It is not one kind of righteousness only that is rewarded, as many think. In whatsoever matters any one does Christ’s commands, he gives Christ meat and drink, Who feeds ever upon the truth and righteousness of His faithful people. So do we weave raiment for Christ when cold, when taking wisdom’s web, we inculcate upon others, and put upon them bowels of mercy. Also when we make ready with divers virtues our heart for receiving Him, or those who are His, we take Him in a stranger into the home of our bosom. Also when we visit a brother sick either in faith or in good works, with doctrine, reproof, or comfort, we visit Christ Himself. Moreover, all that is here, is the prison of Christ, and of them that are His, who live in this world, as though chained in the prison of natural necessity. When we do a good work to these; we visit them in prison, and Christ in them. CHAPTER 26 26:1–21. And it came to pass, when Jesus had finished all these sayings, he said unto his disciples, 2. Ye know that after two days is the feast of the Passover, and the Son of man is betrayed to be crucified. HILARY. After the discourse in which the Lord had declared that He should return in splendour, He announces to them His approaching Passion, that they might learn the close connection between the sacrament of the Cross, and the glory of eternity. RABANUS. All these sayings, i. e. about the consummation of the world, and the day of judgment. Or, finished, because He had fulfilled in doing and preaching all things from the beginning of the Gospel to His Passion. ORIGEN. Yet it is not all barely, but all these; for there were other sayings which He must speak before He should be delivered up. AUGUSTINE. (de Cons. Ev. ii. 78.) We gather from John’s account, that six days before the Passover, Jesus came to Bethany, and thence entered Jerusalem sitting upon the ass, after which were done the things related to have been done at Jerusalem. We understand therefore that four days elapsed from His coming to Bethany, to make this two days before the Passover. (v. 17.) The difference between the Passover and the feast of unleavened bread is this; the name Passover is given to that one day on which the lamb was slain in the evening, that is, the fourteenth moon of the first month; and on the fifteenth moon, the day that the people came out of Egypt, followed the festival of unleavened bread. (vid. Acts 12:3.) But the Evangelists seem to use the terms indifferently.

• From We Were Here (2011)

  WE WERE HERE CaptionMax Page 16 3/23/2011 died, but, you know, the people you didn’t know--the friend of the friend. You know, you’d go get a coffee, and the person who used to give you coffee has died. You- you would, you know, whatever it was you were-- Your banker, your mailman, your-- All that mass, mass death, to the point where you, to some degree, would stop asking if people weren’t around, where they were. Unless you wanted to get into a discussion of them being dead or them being sick. 1:36:11 ON-SCREEN TEXT (on obituary) AIDS Death Notices 1:36:12 PAUL (VO/ON) (CONT’D) So for a number of years, people are all assuming we’ve got this disease and it’s very likely we’ll be dead soon. 1:36:23 ON-SCREEN TEXT (on obituary) He Spawned a World of Music Jon Sims is Dead at Age 37 1:36:25 GUY (VO/ON) Everybody was reading the obituaries because they went from like this (gestures small) to like this (gestures large). You know, it was just like, oh my God, and everybody would get the BAR every week just to see who’s gone. Being the flower man, I was thrown into the middle of it because a lot of people would say, “Guy, uh, my friend died, and I don’t have enough money to buy flowers, and I need some help. Can you help us?” They wanted to bury their friends with a lot of dignity and beauty and-- And I came to you to help me out. You know, I’m emotional because it’s the first time I thought about it. I- I can’t even count the funerals that I did, you know, and if it wasn’t no more than-- You know, some people would bring me a vase, and they said, “Guy, this is all I can afford. Can you put some flowers in it or--.” You know, and I did that, and I, you know, it was never about money, it was about love. You know, it was about these people, not letting my friends down. You know, just helping them to other side. Mmm. 1:37:57 DR. MERVYN SILVERMAN Today I have ordered the closure of fourteen commercial establishments which promote and profit from the spread of AIDS. 1:37:58 TITLE (on archival film) Dr. Mervyn Silverman S.F. HEALTH DIRECTOR

• From We Were Here (2011)

  WE WERE HERE CaptionMax Page 37 3/23/2011 2:24:55 ED (VO/ON) You know, it’s like the AIDS epidemic is not over. I still have friends who are living with HIV. Every once in a while, someone I know becomes infected. I mean, it continues. What has stopped continuing, at least in San Francisco and in most of the- of the developed world, is the- the- the vast amount of sickness and death. I would really like to be able to live long enough to know like how does the epidemic actually come to an end. Like will the treatments come and- and finally and effectively stop people from becoming sicker? And- and will the vaccine come and- and stop people from being able to transmit and acquire it? And- and will it all just finally, finally just stop? 2:26:03 DANIEL You know, when people say how did you get through it, it’s like I don’t know. You know, you just do, and everybody does. I mean, anybody who’s got cancer or AIDS, and there’s like, oh, you’re-- You know, so amazing you’ve- you’ve gotten through this. It’s like, do I have a choice? You know, I want to stay alive and I’m gonna take care of myself the best I can. And you just do it. And it’s not heroic. You just do it. And same thing with losing a partner. It’s, you know, so many, you know-- Most people in the world lose partners, you know, at one time in their lives or another. And you just- you live through it, and it’s horrible, but you do live through it. I know I have so many friends who died so young. That’s-- I mean, that’s-- That, to me, is the most painful part. Wh- what would the world be like now if they were alive? It would be different. It would be very different. Um, so many powerful people, talented people (sighs)… I miss. (sighs) I miss a lot of them. A lot. 2:27:31 CLOSING CREDITS We Were Here Produced and directed by David Weissman Editor/ co-director Bill Weber Director of Photography Marsha Kahm WE WERE HERE CaptionMax Page 38 3/23/2011 Location Sound Lauretta Molitor Music Holcombe Waller In Order of Appearance: Ed Wolf Paul Boneberg Daniel Goldstein Guy Clark Eileen Glutzer Additional Music Doug Hilsinger Post Production Supervisor Bill Weber Audio Post-Production James LeBrecht - Berkeley Sound Artists Color Correction Gary Coates Project Consultants Irene Taylor Brodsky Gail Silva Post Production Services Spy Post Video Arts Camera and Lighting Equipment Robert Dockendorff Archival Research Gerard Koskovich Elizabeth Pepin Silva Archival Support Alex Cherian San Francisco Bay Area Television Archive Rebekah Kim

• From Chasing Beauty

  On April 2, 1854, less than two weeks before Belle’s April birthday, her sister, Adelia Stewart, died of a fever. She was twelve years old. There are no images of Adelia, no books with her name inscribed on a page, no letters or handiwork. She was buried first at Prospect Cemetery in Jamaica, Long Island, in colonial-era land connected to Madame Stewart’s church, and later reburied in the family mausoleum at Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn. “In the midst of life, we are in death” was the opening line to a prayer Belle would have known well from her church’s Book of Common Prayer. The stark reminder appeared too in sermons and stitched samplers. Sudden loss, the kind that the Stewarts experienced, shakes foundations, as it must have done for Belle those spring days of her fourteenth year, with her parents in disarray from grief and worry and burning questions: “Why her? Who’s next?” And more calamities followed. Belle’s parents recorded their losses in light and color, commissioning a set of stained-glass windows by the British Pre-Raphaelite artist Henry Holiday for Grace Church’s sanctuary. Installed in 1883, when Belle was traveling through Asia, the windows are known as “The Raising of Lazarus and of Jairus’ Daughter.” They remain today in memory of Adelia, and also of Belle’s brothers: David Jr., who died of brain cancer in 1874, and James, who died in 1881 at the Stewart home, at the age of twenty-two, of a malarial fever that lasted nineteen days. Belle would see her mother and father when visiting in New York until their deaths in 1886 and 1891, respectively. Presumably, she attended Grace Church when in the city, but she made no record of the windows, nor of the siblings’ deaths they commemorated, in her letters or private papers. [image file=image_rsrc78E.jpg] Grace Church Stewart Family window detail, Benjamin Dykstra (photograph), 2023, courtesy Grace Church in New York, New York. Even so, a line moves from Grace Church to Belle’s future museum in Boston. In constructing Fenway Court all those years later, she testified to her vision of life through a circuitous return to a sacred space of her childhood, where relishing artistic splendor was a profound form of worship and remembrance. As innovative and sui generis as the museum was, it also followed a family path. Belle did as her parents had done but on a much larger scale. She transformed overwhelming personal loss into art, into beauty.

• From Chasing Beauty

  On the freezing cold evening of December 10, Jack dined at the Exchange Club on the corner of Milk and Batterymarch Streets in the city’s financial district. This was typical of his routine, particularly if matters had kept him at his office until later in the day. At some point during the evening, he collapsed after suffering a devastating stroke. He was rushed back to Beacon Street, where Isabella sent for their physician, Dr. Paul Thorndike. It was too late. Jack Gardner died later that evening, shortly before nine o’clock. He had just turned sixty-one. [image file=image_rsrc79W.jpg] John L. Gardner Jr. and Unidentified Man on the Steamship “Polly,” unknown maker, August 27, 1898, gelatin silver print. He seemed to have sensed that something was awry with his health earlier in the fall, but it’s not clear whether he confided any concerns to his wife. He worried more than usual about their spending; she no doubt noticed he had slowed down. At some point in these months, he reached out to a lawyer, William C. Endicott Jr., a family cousin, to familiarize him with their estate. Jack wanted to be sure everything was in tip-top order. He also wanted someone Isabella could trust, who was conversant with all facets of her collecting, especially its financial aspects. Jack made his nephew George Peabody Gardner a trustee of the estate, but he gave Isabella access to one of his two trusts, believing she’d know what to do, just as his father John Lowell Gardner Sr. had confidence that she would know how to make Green Hill flourish. As he’d so often done before, Jack was setting her up for success and putting his faith and confidence in her. Two days later, his obituary in the Boston Evening Transcript called him “one of the best-known men in Boston,” then listed his public accomplishments: his large stake in the Chicago, Burlington, and Quincy Railroad; his service as longtime treasurer at the Museum of Fine Arts and on the Board of Overseers of Harvard since 1889; his tenure on the board of the Humane Society of Massachusetts. Harvard College had awarded him an honorary degree in 1898, on the occasion of the fortieth anniversary of his class. He had left Harvard before graduation to join his family in Paris in the 1850s, where he first met his dear Belle.

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  18. In Rama was there a voice heard, lamentation, and weeping, and great mourning, Rachel weeping for her children, and would not be comforted, because they are not. CHRYSOSTOM. (Hom. ix.) The Evangelist by this history of so bloody a massacre, having filled the reader with horror, now again sooths his feelings, shewing that these things were not done because God could not hinder, or knew not of them; but as the Prophet had foretold. JEROME. (In Hierem. 31:15.) This passage of Jeremiah has been quoted by Matthew neither according to the Hebrew nor the LXX version. This shews that the Evangelists and Apostles did not follow any one’s translation, but according to the Hebrew manner expressed in their own words what they had read in Hebrew. JEROME. By Ramah we need not suppose that the town of that name near Gibeah is meant; but take it as signifying ‘high.’ A voice was heard ‘aloft,’ that is, spread far and wide.’ PSEUDO-CHRYSOSTOM. Or, it was heard on high, because uttered for the death of the innocent, according to that, The voice of the poor entereth into the heavens. (Ecclus. 35:21.) The ‘weeping’ means the cries of the children; ‘lamentation,’ refers to the mothers. In the infants themselves their death ends their cries, in the mothers it is continually renewed by the remembrance of their loss. JEROME. Rachel’s son was Benjamin, in which tribe Bethlehem is not situated. How then does Rachel weep for the children of Judah as if they were her own? We answer briefly. She was buried near Bethlehem in Ephrata, and was regarded as the mother, because her body was there entertained. Or, as the two tribes of Judah and Benjamin were contiguous, and Herod’s command extended to the coasts of Bethlehem as well as to the town itself, we may suppose that many were slain in Benjamin. PSEUDO-AUGUSTINE. (Hil. Quæst. N. and V. Test. 9. 62.) Or, The sons of Benjamin, who were akin to Rachel, were formerly cut off by the other tribes, and so extinct both then and ever after. (see Judg. 20.) Then therefore Rachel began to mourn her sons, when she saw those of her sister cut off in such a cause, that they should be heirs of eternal life; for he who has experienced any misfortune, is made more sensible of his losses by the good fortune of a neighbour. REMIGIUS. The sacred Evangelist adds, to shew the greatness of the mourning, that even the dead Rachel was roused to mourn her sons, and would not be comforted because they were not. JEROME. This may be understood in two ways; either she thought them dead for all eternity, so that no consolation could comfort her; or, she desired not to receive any comfort for those who she knew had gone into life eternal.

• From Chasing Beauty

  The Gardners stopped a few days in Milan and then made their way to Paris for fashion and another set of Boucheron pearls. Three days after they arrived at Hôtel du Rhine, they received a telegram with dreadful news: Joe Jr. had died by suicide. He had just turned twenty-five. “He was a dear noble-hearted fellow and everybody that knew him loved him,” Jack wrote immediately to Georgy. They had worried it would come to this, even as they hoped Joe “might pull through his attack.” Jack went on to say he felt confident of the course of action that had been taken, which had given Joe “the best chance of recovery.” No matter. “His life has been for years one of suffering and misery and I think that if he had lived, it could never have been very different. I am very sorry that I could not have been at home to share your care and responsibility and to be with the boys in their trouble but I do not think that my presence or advice would have suggested any better (or different) course of treatment or led to any other result.” If he sounded soothing, wanting to spare Georgy and Joe’s brothers, Amory and young Gussie, a crushing sense of guilt, it is likely he also wanted to reassure himself. Jack knew well what it was to feel sickening remorse after his own brother Joe Gardner Sr. had died by suicide a decade before. *** BELLE LEFT NO RECORD OF HOW SHE WRESTLED WITH HER GRIEF AND guilt over Joe Jr. She had taken her responsibilities toward the three Gardner brothers very seriously. No letters between Belle and Joe Jr. survive. Ralph Curtis, who had just seen the Gardners in Venice, wrote a condolence letter, saying that his father, Daniel Curtis, had been “particularly charmed” by Joe. Another friend fondly remembered that Joe was the “wittiest man” of his generation. But for the most part, his was a silenced life. At some later point, Isabella placed a small photograph of Joe as a young man between early photographs of her and Jack in a small box with a velvet backing, as a kind of relic or shrine. In the center, above all three, is an oval painted portrait of her blue-eyed Jackie, rimmed in gold. These were the two boys she and Jack lost. She’d not banished Joe Jr. from her memory. She placed the assemblage in a corner cabinet of the Little Salon of Fenway Court, the last gallery she would curate and furnish. They had been a family. She would remember. [image file=image_rsrc794.jpg] Miniature Portraits of John “Jackie” Lowell Gardner III, Isabella Stewart Gardner, Joseph Peabody Gardner Jr., and John L. Gardner Jr., W. Caflin (miniature), about 1865; E. Tilton and Company (JLG and ISG tintypes), about 1860; unknown maker, about 1880–86, painted miniature, tintypes.

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  HILARY. It could not be that they were not who seemed now dead, but by glorious martyrdom they were advanced to eternal life; and consolation is for those who have suffered loss, not for those who have reaped a gain. Rachel affords a type of the Church long barren now at length fruitful. She is heard weeping for her children, not because she mourned them dead, but because they were slaughtered by those whom she would have retained as her first-born sons. RABANUS. Or, The Church weeps the removal of the saints from this earth, but wishes not to be comforted as though they should return again to the struggles of life, for they are not to be recalled into life. GLOSS. (ord.) She will not be comforted in this present life, for that they are not, but transfers all her hope and comfort to the life to come. RABANUS. Rachel is well set for a type of the Church, as the word signifies ‘a sheep’ or ‘seeing;’ (vid. note i, p. 19.) her whole thought being to fix her eye in contemplation of God; and she is the hundredth sheep that the shepherd layeth on his shoulder. 2:19–2019. But when Herod was dead, behold, an Angel of the Lord appeareth in a dream to Joseph in Egypt, 20. Saying, Arise, and take the young Child and His mother, and go into the land of Israel; for they are dead which sought the young Child’s life. EUSEBIUS. (Eccles. Hist. i. 8.) For the sacrilege which Herod had committed against the Saviour, and his wicked slaughter of the infants of the same age, the Divine vengeance hastened his end; and his body, as Josephus relates, was attacked by a strange disease; so that the prophets declared that they were not human ailments, but visitations of Divine vengeance. Filled with mad fury, he gives command to seize and imprison the heads and nobles out of all parts of Judæa; ordering that as soon as ever he should breathe his last, they should be all put to death, that so Judæa though unwillingly might mourn at his decease. Just before he died he murdered his son Antipater, (besides two boys put to death before, Alexander and Aristobulus.) Such was the end of Herod, noticed in those words of the Evangelist, when Herod was dead, and such the punishment inflicted. JEROME. Many here err from ignorance of history, supposing the Herod who mocked our Lord on the day of His passion, and the Herod whose death is here related, were the same. But the Herod who was then made friends with Pilate was son of this Herod and brother to Archelaus; for Archelaus was banished to Lyons in Gaul, and his father Herod made king in his room, as we read in Josephus.

• From Chasing Beauty

  She would keep the pale-green satin dress. Many years later she cut its fabric into sections and framed a large piece to place beneath her most momentous purchase by an Italian Renaissance genius: Titian’s grand painting The Rape of Europa. It is still regarded as one of the most important paintings in any American collection. As elsewhere in Fenway Court, she would situate this masterpiece within an assemblage of images and objects. Titian’s work would not appear in isolation but rather in an unfolding historical, cultural, and personal narrative. These were the years when she was in the middle of things and making her social claim, which was not a distraction but a path. The gorgeous fabric under the painting reminds the viewer of her daring, as a woman, to choose to display art in the way that most pleased her. Three weeks after the June party, a telegram arrived with news that Isabella’s father had fallen badly ill while vacationing with his new wife at the Hotel Champlain in Clinton County, New York. Isabella was on Roque Island in Maine when she heard, but Jack was away, most likely on a sailing cruise with nephews or friends. Arthur Jephson, an Irish-born adventurer whom they’d met several years before, had been staying with the Gardners that summer, first on the North Shore and then on Roque. The young man accompanied Isabella on the overnight train to New York so she could be at her father’s side. Mr. Stewart had a bad heart, but this attack was unexpected. For a short while, he seemed to rally but then quickly worsened. He died on July 17, 1891, a few weeks shy of turning eighty-one. It’s not known if Belle arrived in time to say goodbye. Isabella’s father’s death came as she was still in the midst of mourning a very close friend, the painter Dennis Bunker, who had died of pneumonia suddenly, at the age of twenty-nine, shortly after his marriage. She had bought one of his—in his words—“parti-colored” canvases the year before, The Brook at Medfield, which she kept on display, first at Green Hill and later at Fenway Court. She felt a special bond with him not only because of his large talent but because he was the same age her Jackie would have been, had he lived. [image file=image_rsrc79F.jpg] Titian Room, Twenty Photographs of the Second and Third Floor Galleries, Fenway Court, Boston, 1903–26, Thomas E. Marr and Son, 1915, gelatin silver print.