Eternal Love

goodness above all else, with Jillian Sullivan and in memory of Brian Turner

“Love Rising,” Beth Kephart, Marbled Paper

She’d imagined them married. They had found each other, after all, and now was the time they had. To settle safely beneath the sky. To stop for lichen, flax, and stars. To walk along the Idaburn stream and up the tufted Idaburn hills. To build a house or a meal, a poem or a story, a lifetime in a fraction of a lifetime’s years.

When his brain began, in his words, to feel “like a shower of asteroids coming at him,” she stayed near. When he was “broken and rebroken,” she did not waver. When she wrote of him, she honored him with essays pursuant to his beauty. He was not less than; he was changing. He was yet a poet, yet a gentleman, yet a cyclist waiting for her on sharp hills, yet a man crouching beside her in “newly sown hemp rows.”

In the end, dementia infiltrates and dominates and steals. In the end, Brian Turner, New Zealand’s former Poet Laureate and Jillian Sullivan’s great love, moved into a progression of treatment centers. When Brian passed away a few weeks ago, Jillian stood before their friends and yielded these words from her wide heart, as only my friend Jillian could. This is love, Jillian said. This is the everlasting:

There’s been so much in the media lately about Brian, and descriptions of him as a great man in literature. And he was. And he was also a great man in his dementia, because even with his life closing in on him, his loss of independence, the pain he suffered, even in a world where he was bewildered from lack of memory, he conducted himself with kindness and respect to each person he met.

… Two days ago I drove behind the hearse, following Brian to the crematorium, playing Andrea Bocelli, singing, conducting, crying, watching the hearse with my heart. And I said to Brian, you don’t have to stay in the hearse, you can ride on top of the car if you want, you can be anywhere, and then instead of crying, I felt this wave of happiness over me that stayed with me all the drive…. The love did not die. I felt on that drive that I understood, for the first time, the eternity of love.

To conduct oneself with kindness is as great an act—as essential, as heroic—as the writing of a poem, the winning of awards, the collection of trophies and stars. To see a man for his goodness above all else is to reveal the goodness of the seer.

(All words shared with the permission of Jillian Sullivan.)