Why do we write? To be heard, seen, read…

I submitted the following interview / op-ed to dozens of papers. What does it say about me, about them that I needed to post this as a challenge?

Paul Harrison’s wife Rita was only 55 when she died on March 12, shortly before Californians were ordered to Shelter in Place. Although it wasn’t Covid-19 but the other big C that claimed her life, Paul’s friends wondered if Rita wasn’t a “smart lady who knew when to take off.”

“If it weren’t for the lockdown,” he said, “I would have been at the bars every night getting ‘stinking drunk’.” That or anything else to dull the pain of losing the woman who embodied it all for him – brilliance, friendship and eternal love.

So it was truly a silver lining that the world changed in the thick of his grieving and before he could plan a memorial.

Paul had promised Rita before she passed that he would “be all right” and in the four months after her death, he had no opportunity to do anything else but figure out what that meant. Although it hurt every day and in every way to get up out of bed and put on his “big-boy pants,” he did it in fulfillment of his oath.

Today he speaks with both a calm and passion in describing the Rita Harrison River Deep Mountain High Memorial Retreat to be held in Arizona in late October.

To connect the dots of meaning in his life, he explained how the week-long celebration of her life will also be “to honor all the people who changed our world because they had to… because they were there.”

During this pandemic, he says, “all of us have become unlikely heroes,” noting that “people found ways to make a massive statement: This is my life and I choose to live it.”

He mentions the people who have already been acknowledged in the media – those who lost their lives, the ones who were front-line heroes, especially all the clerks and delivery persons who made minimum wage and that we never gave much thought to before.

“And teachers!” he exclaims. Parents have a renewed gratitude for teachers for “being with their children so that they can have time to work… and think… and eat… and sleep!”

From his British perspective, Paul noticed that in every single country when Big Government told people to “stay home,” that was acknowledgment that leaders didn’t really know what to do or how to protect its citizens.

“Politicians passed the buck from the federal level down to state, county and community,” he says without rancor, “and we had to step up and we did.”

“Parents stood up with their kids and loved them every day. Spouses didn’t kill each other! Seniors learned to use their computers and Zoom with their families. Millennials looked up from their phones and said, ‘I can do something,’ Stars stopped being stars and gave concerts and raised money. Friends. Strangers. We changed the face of the earth.”

“I lost the love of my life and her clients thought they lost their therapist, healer and guru,” he went on to say. That she never thought of herself as any of those came from a genuine humility and respect for every individual’s unique way of living out their life. Rita Harrison said often that every person deserves dignity and esteem simply as a human being… which doesn’t mean perfection… but goodness, blind spots and resources of all kinds.

“That’s why I believe that this memorial is the perfect place to celebrate how the People, the Folk, common and not-so-common, mobilized themselves. Nobody should be able to take that away from them… that They Got It Done. And they should remember to pass this on to their children. They must tell them.”

“Even though everyone was isolated, people built this with solidarity. For all the diversity in this country, everyone pulled together, and trouble only arose when differences were stressed again. Despite what the cynics are saying, people are changing the world quietly and for no credit.”

“We grinned and beared it – hating the masks but wearing them – because it taught us about respect, respect for each other’s autonomy.”