Search Results for: ed and carol gulley

Our friend Susan Popper is new to our town, she has also become friends with Carol Gulley, as are Maria and I.

Without really meaning to, we have become something of a regular dinner group, we seem to be taking turns having dinner at each other’s house. First we had dinner at our farmhouse, tonight at Susan’s new house in Cambridge, and Saturday, Carol is cooking.

It’s a kind of accidental thing, but we have all enjoyed it and want to keep going. I want to say that Carol, for all that she has endured, and all that she may endure – grieving is a very personal and individual thing – is all right.

She is certainly sad and acutely feeling Ed’s loss, but she is also thinking about her life and talking about her life, and sometimes, even laughing about her life.

Sometimes she needs to talk, but she also wants to listen, and that is how friendships begin.

So our dinners are not a support group,  Carol doesn’t need that, they are a group of friends sharing their lives with one another, we all have good stories to tell, we all want to hear the stories of one another. I think we will all be meeting regularly.

Carol is honest and open, she is committed to her writing, and to her blog. She worries about how she will do without Ed to share her ideas, or to live her life, but I told her that she has been writing the blog on her own for months now and she is a natural writer, full of humor, insight and authenticity.

She said she sometimes savors being alone, she has not really had a chance to think and adjust to this staggering new reality. She sounds very healthy to me, she needs time and space to think.

Ed was her life in many ways and shared her life in so many ways for 47 years. She will endure what she needs to endure and move forward with her life, that much seems clear to me.

Carol is almost obsessively polite, and I hope she learns to fend off people  who intrude on her life without asking or thinking. That is up to her.

Carol is a writer now, she is only beginning to come to grips with that idea. She writes almost every day on her blog, the Bejosh Farm Journal she writes poems and tells stores and shares the trauma, drama, love and exploration of her life. Carol is a fierce critic of Carol, she is a harsh judge of her own work and she is almost always sure she is letting everybody down.

I tell her what I tell all of my other writing students, she should never speak ill of her own work, it might be listening. I told her that I ask only two questions when I write: how do I feel, and is it the truth. If the answer to both questions is yes, I go ahead and write.

I have to say Carol is somewhat familiar to me, another woman with many gifts who does not know how talented she is, and who is struggling to find her voice, especially now that she is alone and “My Farmer” is no longer the focus of her writing.

She is, and that is a big change.

The British writer Deborah Levy asks in her new memoir The Cost Of Living, what if a woman is the main character of her own story? She writes about the challenge of finding her voice in a world “fathered by masculine consciousness.”

I see Carol  finding her voice.

I said weeks ago that I have been privileged to witness Carol ascending.

Her strength and creativity and curiosity are emerging slowly but steadily from her long nightmare. In some ways, she lived in the shadow of Ed for many of those years, he was a strong and dominant man.

Now, she has  some freedom in her life, it was not freedom she sought or wanted, but I think it is very real and will one day be important to her.

We traded stories, and Carol was as open and self-aware as I have ever seen her.

She is, it turns out, very social – something she didn’t have time to explore as a busy dairy farmer – and especially loves the company of women. She is looking for her tribe, her community. I think she is finding it.

Carol and I are very good friends, but I am not blind, she is most at ease with women like Susan and Maria, who talk openly and honestly, and who are safe and nourishing. Sometimes, the mere prescence of men is dampening and suffocating.

Maria knows how to listen, and she has a great gift for encouragement. Susan knows how to laugh, and as different as these two women are, they seemed to connect easily with one another. Carol’s life and heart  are with her family and farm world,  she will decided in the coming months and years if her universe will really expand. It seems it already is.

Carol doesn’t need to hear how bad things will be, she knows that all too well. She needs to hear that she is strong and smart and has so much to offer the world, even without her beloved Ed. She needs to talk about life, not death.

She needs to be encouraged to step out into the light when she is able and ready, and cheered along the way. That is sincere, it was a great joy to see her tonight, and then again, on Saturday. This group might ultimately be better without me in it, and if so, I’ll bow out of it.

I never tell anyone what is ahead when it comes to grieving, I don’t know. But I had a strong and good feeling about Carol tonight, she is awakening and thinking and hoping, as well as grieving.

I just know she will be all right.

Ed Gulley was always a major presence in my life in the time that I knew him. I saw him almost every day in the four months between his diagnosis and his death.

He died a couple of weeks ago, and after the funeral my life has gotten frantic, especially with the fund-raising campaign to send the refugee Sakler Moo, a member of the refugee soccer team I sponsor,  to the Albany Academy.

That work with Sakler and some of the other refugees has kept me running back and forth to Albany and I guess I haven’t had time to think of Ed much.

I text or call Carol every day and check on her, and we have had her over to dinner. Right now, I think she wants to be alone and needs to be alone. Maria and I want to stay in close touch with her, we also want to give her the space she needs.

This morning, it was very warm and I got up to water our two new Paper Burch trees. I was standing next to one tree, and lookedto the right and saw Ed Gulley’s Goose sculpture one of his best and one of his last.

Suddenly, Ed’s loss seemed to hit me right in the heart. We always loved Ed’s art works, Maria was so involved in his creating them. They are all over our farm, wooden flowers, wind chimes, the Tin Man.

He is a difficult presence to replace, a great and buoyant spirit, and I miss him. It hasn’t quite sunk in that I will never see him again. The Goose brings me back to the Ed Gulley I want to remember, the one who built a bridge to our back woods and hauled it down the pasture on his back. The Ed Gulley who built a bench for us to sit on by the stream.

The Ed Gulley who came to our Open Houses, sold his farm art and lectured everyone he meet about the need to drink whole milk and raise the price farmers get paid for it. His milk lecture.

We got a great kick out of each other, he respected my mind greatly and relished our talks, and so did I. This almost always puzzled me, we were so different, yet so much alike.

I was not comfortable at the County Fair, looking at the lovely memorial his family built to him in one of the cow. I just felt sad, it was not the same as Ed, and I can hardly imagine what Carol was feeling.

I think the Goose shows how skillful Ed was at bringing animals and nature into his art, using tractor and other farm parts to give his work it’s authenticity and feeling. The Goose was largely made of blades from a hay chopper, Ed never quite got the legs right so I had to prop the Goose up with a wooden board.

He was so close to the natural world, and to the mystery of animals. When Ed was diagnosed he told me he finally felt free, to leave behind the hard world of the dairy farmer and work on his art. For a week or so, he worked furiously on his art, and then he couldn’t. That was the heartbreaking part, in one sense.

The Goose seems serious and dignified to me, I love seeing it out there by the road, it can  honk at anybody it chooses to honk at.

There it shall stay.

Everybody has their own ideas about the afterlife and heaven, I would love to believe in both but mostly do not. Ed had his time on the earth, and I have mine, and I see no reason why we would all live on forever in one way or another. Who promised me that?

Heaven would be more crowded than Manhattan  is at rush hour. Do I really want to hang out with all of those people?

Ed told me he would come down and talk to me from time to time, but I don’t think he’s been down here yet.

It was my job to tell Ed’s story as he lay dying, that was what he asked of me. It is my job now to try to remember him in a meaningful way. The Goose is my contact point, my channel with Ed. If he is up there, the Goose will let me know.

As it is, she (or he) is a great comfort to me, dignified and grateful and rusty like an ancient tractor.

How you doing, Ed. A tough son-of-a-bitch you be, you got two rows of tits on either s–i–i–i–d–e.

Ed tried to teach me this line a hundred times, but I could never get it right while he was alive. Ever since he died, I  get it right every time.

Maybe we are talking to each other.

The Washington County Fair is a big deal to the Gulley family. It was a big deal to Ed and is still a big deal for Carol, and for their children and grandchildren, many of whom are in 4-H and sleep at the fair with their cows.

I went to the fair today to see Carol and  her family and also to see the memorial exhibit Ed’s daughter Maggie made for the fair – photos, flowers, messages of love and remembrance.

I wanted to get a photo of the memorial with Carol and Maggie, and they agreed. Ed loved the fair and wanted his cows to do well, and Bejosh cows have already won two 1st place ribbons. I got a chance to see Carol and talk with her, she is hurting but strong.

I could see that being at the fair was a hard thing for her, it was such a part of her life with Ed every summer. The memorial is impressive, and many people stopped to look at it and comment on it. I hope to get back again over the weekend.

We had the loveliest time with Carol Gulley Wednesday night, it was just a few days since Ed’s funeral, we thought it might be good for Carol to get out and have dinner with some friends, all of them women, as it happened.

Maria was there, of course, and so were our friends Liz Haggerty and Susan Popper. Both of these women have been through transformative experiences and are intuitive and thoughtful. I’ve noticed that Carol is very much at ease with women, she talks to them easily and openly.

I think she tends to withdraw  around strong and loud men.

My own instinct – I was cook and dishwasher – was to stay in the  background. Women are natural healers, in many cases. The chemistry was very strong. Carol and I are close friends, but sometimes I think I am one of those men to her.

And  I want to be honest, as much as Carol loved him, Ed was not the easiest husband in the world.

He tended to fill all of the spaces he was in, he quite naturally took center stage, was opinionated and often impatient with the opinions of others. I think Carol quite often deferred to him and slipped into the background quite instinctively. She  calls him My Farmer in her blog, never  Ed.

I loved Ed too, but I don’t want to deify him. He was very human. He could be overpowering. He and I were two blowhards together, I could blow back.

I thought Carol needed a quiet night. We talked very little of Ed’s illness and the funeral. I don’t want to share the details of our talking.

So I cooked a dinner of scallops, fresh corn, tomatoes with mozzarella cheese and fresh melon, all from the Moses Farm, the descendants of Grandma herself.

The evening was lovely, from beginning to end. I came and went, and finally disappeared to do the dishes. The conversation flowed easily and comfortably, it sounded lovely from the kitchen, like one of the beautiful running streams.

I think these women all took their cues from Carol without discussing it. They just knew to do it.

Carol didn’t say much at first. Her eyes were puffy and full of sorrow.

But then, as the evening wore on and she began to feel more at ease. She opened up and told us some of the very beautiful and touching stories of her life, about her horse Blackjack, her beloved father, early life on Bejosh Farm with Ed.

Sometimes she needed to be quiet, sometimes she needed to talk.

We all let her decide.

Carol is very proud of her blog, the popular Bejosh Farm Journal,  and I ought to say, she was the engine of that blog and of it’s growth, the woman that is always behind the great man.

She had a great subject in Ed and Bejosh Farm, but she has the pride and  ego of the natural bloggers, she always knows how many hits and visits the blog gets. She is proud of it, I can tell, and she will continue publishing it. It will be worth following.

Carol was shattered by Ed’s death, but she is also strong and resilient. As often happens, his illness transformed her, she had little choice. This is a process, and she is in it.

Over the last couple of months, I’ve witnessed Carol’s compassion, her devotion to family, her love of Ed,  and now I am witnessing something else, an emergence. I felt last night I was talking to Carol in a very different way than I  have talked with  her. I felt the beginnings of a different Carol.

I knew Carol, we were friends, but this is a different Carol. There is no shadow over her, no towering presence to support and to get out of the way of, or argue with. She will get used to that.

It was just a lovely evening. We could see Carol relax and open up as the night went on.

Maria and I were thinking how well these women did with each other, how at ease they all were with her (Maria too, of course).

She told all kinds of stories of the County Fair, just getting underway (she gave us all tickets, Ed was a big cheese at the fair.) She asked us to make sure to find the grandkids, they are staying in campers and 4-H dormitories to be near their cows.

I want to see the Ed Gulley memorial display his daughter Maggie put up, and i want to see my portrait of photos of him hanging on the exhibit. There are rumors of Thai food at the fair this year, that would be an earthquake.

At dinner, what I was thinking once again was that women are different from men, many are natural and instinctive healers. They understand one another better than most men understand them. The Goddesses seem to reside in many women, they pop up when needed, especially if they are needed by other women.

The evening could have been painful and awkward, but it wasn’t, it was safe and warm and healing, in the way women sometimes are and men rarely are.

I think these women will be getting together often. I felt friendships taking hold.  I think it was so good for Carol to come out to have dinner with  us, I wasn’t sure she could.

We sat and ate and talked for several hours (I was in the kitchen the last hour) and it felt like such a good place to be.  Carol came to life. It was light when they came and pitch black when they got up to leave.

I hadn’t planned to write about it, I didn’t take any photos, but afterwards, I realized I had to write about it.

Tonight, Carol took an important step away from the abyss, she stepped out into the light. Her life had just been shattered, the pieces were beginning to fall into place. Grieving is like that.

I wished peace for Ed, and I wish it for Carol, she knows what’s ahead. And she runs from nothing.

I woke up this morning at 2 a.m. I was somewhat mesmerized by our night-light, which Maria spotted at an antique story a few weeks ago, it cost $30. It exists in the corner of our bedroom, it casts a lovely shadow on the ceiling.

It casts a very soft light in the room and off of the ceiling, Maria has made it into a kind of shrine, there is Buddha and some rocks and crystals. I love the feel of it.

I never did get back to sleep, this has happened to me every night this week. I am not as tired as I ought to be.

A kind of loneliness and need for solitude has swept over me lately, I am keeping to myself.

Tonight, we have invited Carol Gulley and some friends that she knows over for dinner, some people – women –  I know she will relate to and knows and feels comfortable with. I’m cooking tonight, scallops and fresh corn and tomato and mozzarella cheese.

Maria wants my recipe, but I never give her my recipes, my grandmother, a superstitious Russian, cautioned me to never give away my recipes, people will leave me. It’s crazy, but I believe it.

I can only guess what Carol is feeling, how painful and how disorienting it might be to suddenly be without a partner of 47 years. I honestly don’t think I can be of much help directly, other than helping her to get out or talk when she needs to.

I imagine that there will be many times she doesn’t need to or want to. Or can’t.

Carol wanted to come, and that pleased and surprised us. I was rushing around all morning getting the right ingredients.

Otherwise, I am not feeling up to much socializing and I am realizing how little I care for most socializing. I  tend to favor one on one dinners with conversations, parties or large gatherings are shaped by small talk, they are about small talk, and I am not good at small talk or comfortable with it.

Perhaps it has to do with the Dyslexia, I am told that it sometimes does.

It’s curious but I never thought much about Dyslexia until recently, and I am only beginning to see how it has shaped my life. Maria was looking at one of my fish photographs and was trying to explain the waterline, the tank line, and fish  reflections. I couldn’t fathom where one began and the other ended, she saw it right away.

I simply couldn’t grasp what she was saying or understand where one began and the other ended. Then I said to her, “Maria, I can’t process this, it’s the Dyslexia,” and it was good to say and not feel stupid, as I was often made to feel.

I’m not sure where my thirst for solitude is coming from, it might have to do with Ed Gulley’s death from cancer, I can’t say I know. I used to call this a funk, a black hole, but that was fear speaking, now I see it as sweet and cleansing and necessary.

In recent years, the need for solitude has swept over me in great waves, it’s like an ocean tide that goes in and  out. Sometimes, you just look up and see that is far out. I need it and find it precious.

There is freedom in solitude, I feel I can grow old freely. I need to be preoccupied with my own usefulness and future less and less. I can now offer services to the world that I could not offer before, there was simply no space in my head.

I have lost many of the obligations and dependencies that shaped so much of my life.

My increasingly empty and long marriage ended, my daughter is grown up and highly competent, my life as a book author is winding down even as my life as a writer seems to just be  beginning. I really have very little to prove, and my life will soon enough begin to wind down.

I lost my father, mother, my child lives far away, I never speak to my brother and sometimes speak to my sister, I am not on fire to find success or rewards or  recognition.

I love my life with Maria, and talk often with a friend or two. I love being on the farm, writing, taking photos,  reading books. Most of the time, this is enough for me.

Ironically, this means I can find a community now, I can do what is the most meaningful to me. I am not religious but I live in a community of faith, I take the world seriously but never too seriously.

I can laugh at myself, and I do, all of the time. This is an important reversal.

It used to be that everyone else laughed at me, and i couldn’t. Life is inherently ridiculous, and if I can’t laugh at it, I will wither like the early spring flowers turning brown in our garden.

In loneliness, I have found  my mantra. Do not be afraid, I tell myself, I am accepted.