Respect Life - Respect Love

More than a decade after having been widowed, I was runnung around doing life really nicely again. Our children grown and thriving and my art en route to the White House - just for a special Easter event, done annually.

I was re-reading the Helen Keller Biography. Her spectacular true story “The Miracle Worker” reached film honors in 1962 and inspired my mother to learn lip-reading and re-open her life after being stricken some years before, too young, and suffering. Mother was reborn! Another spectacular success for a formerly-disabled woman.

It was soulful and sensitive and loving - the Helen Keller story in our home, and we would discuss it from all sides for hours - so I was truly enjoying the re-read that day, decades later!
… when one paragraph changed my life in one tiny spot - forever.

I knew that Helen Keller learned and succeeded in life well beyond expectations. She thrived so well and was so lovely as a young woman that men found her specialness attractive and had crushes on her - including one to whom she became briefly engaged. The consensus however was that marriage would be a threat to Helen’s life and it was ended, to the sorrow of all for awhile. The issue of disabled rights to love and romance and sexual rights remains a touchy one even today, when the issue has been won: We respond to make a disabled person’s life as rich and full and normal as possible and the right to love and be love, disabled or otherwise, is law today!

But at that time, - no. I did not understand or support such mean and unfair controls on a person’s life. My Mother in her hearing aid, let me help her when I was six and it was a revelation - to help another in any way was a thrill for a little girl - and still is. The Helen Keller story became one of our own and we thanked God for it.

So it shook me deeply to find in my re-reading of the Helen keller story, that her sweetheart was named Peter Fagan - my late husband’s name.

I did not know - it is not funny now, and it was not funny then. A really poor-taste coincidence.

I saw my late husband in my minds eye when I was thirteen - met him at a college dance af few years later and it was love inarguable at first sight and lasted until his death.
What muse of evil mischief thought it fun or funny to match a deaf woman’s daughter with a guy whose name happened to be Peter Fagan and in Connectiut where the story unfolded? His son is Peter John Fagan and so my case is a living one. The oddity of it makes it worse. I truly did not know, but if my husband was alive and we were still the hsppy pair, I know we’d have our way with it, in discrete but certain righteousness.

But alone, and aging with memories tender, I still would like to know “What on Earth” !? We were a pair and thanked God with good deeds for the world every day and I have done more of the same and extra in his hame and that of the Lord who made us!

I know that when we paired up, it was VietNam and my joecollege guys were in a noir mode. I finally decided it was about the grim times back then.
We did really well till his death and those who joked, gave us the last laugh.

But LOVE is the miracle - the empowerer - and love has taken such a beating with the upgrades in mores, lots of collateral damage has occurred. Life goes on and we bend or we break, guaranteed.
But if we are to triumph and endure, we must do this: When you speak and pray, ask that we respect love again.
Talk with your loved ones about your love / their love - spouse, children, co-workeres, even! Do not say “thy know that”….make it real - make words together about it. Words. that create a real network in the mind and heart and soul. I am older and feel compelled to share this lesson from life.

We do not need more psychological thrillers or childish romcoms - we need really attractive LOVE STORIES - the real thing to inspire today’s people - tomorrow’s people - to find the delight, the fun, the worth, the power the enduring life in LOVE.

Comment welcome.