June 27, 2002 "I read them with a horrible pang, thinking of how none of us ever imagined what lay ahead for Jean and the kids and you. Getting left behind with your little sister, kidnaped by a black-garbed stranger, or victimized by divorce is small change compared to other realities. I think about all of you all the time, but am running out of cheery things to write. I love Jean. She is one of those rare people who actually do good things to help people, instead of talking about them. She is also the funniest, wittiest, most original lady I met in many a year." Dear Friends: The above is from one of my favorite (OK, also darkly witty, brutally honest, and deftly funny) letterwriters on this old planet. Witness readers from Jeanie’s era would know Deirdre Luzwick for her black and white prints which may be studied for their load of cultural detail and dark irony. She reports that several years back in response to an urging to do a book of prints on kid’s fears, she put out a call to hear from the children. One of three responses (which recently turned up in an old porch cupboard) were from Lydia via Jeanie. Scrawled on Dairy Queen napkins are the following three scenarios of dread: "Father is nering and me and my sister trip and can not fint Dad. You are left aloan with your little sister;" "He climbs up your window and caris you a way in a bag. He wares a mask and black cloase;" "Scared of parents divorsing or leaving you aloan." None of these are really small change, but I think how quickly that little girl has been forced to grow up, how wise she is beyond her years, and how, even now, she ministers to me. This may be a tricky update letter to write. I will try to be deft and honest, if not witty. Jeanie is miraculously well on a certain level. The neurologist smiles and cries and hugs us once again in an assessment last week. She wonders if someone ought to recheck that original tumor - was it as deadly as they seem to have misunderstood? Sometimes I figure JWK had more brains than us all and the Handicapper General has only brought her down to size. In social situations she has the unconstrained candor to cut through bullshit with a simple and straightforward word - and get away with it (she is ill after all). I often come upon her singing hymns, including verses of obscure and artful Anglican tunes in minor keys. She woke this morning singing me a made-up love song, a blessing true. As the girls are at camp this week (Lydia at an archdiocesan peace and justice institute and Lucy with the Methodists) we are up at the cabin where she per usual is harvesting beauty by the vase - mostly daisies. She is incredibly sweet and, as I asked her point blank the other day, really as happy as she seems. She traveled with me last week to DC for a Sojourners board meeting and did quite well with all the necessary extended efforts of travel and displacement. In April she came along to the first Word and World school in Greensboro, NC. (If you don’t know about this really wonderful floating theological feast for movement activists, check out recent articles in the Witness -http://thewitness.org/menucurrent.html ). It was truly and completely wonderful (she loved it and was thoroughly loved in return) but, to stay honest, also excruciating in a way. I am mindful of all the conversations at the edge of which she can sit, but never enter into. I’m conscious that, all things being equal, she ought to be teaching at these events, but instead pulls her chair safely to the margin of the circle. Last week a union/community activist who works at the Poletown plant (some of you will know Jeanie’s film and book on the destruction of a Detroit neighborhood to build a Cadillac plant some twenty ears ago) came by for a visit. He’d just discovered the book and was overflowing with enthusiasm and schemes to get the history in front of his union local and stir a few new people into action. We had lots of overlapping connections in the barrio of Southwest Detroit and we’re conspiring together to make something, even a participant reunion, happen. He remarked on how beautiful Jeanie is (and this said even having seen the stunning photo of her when she was 29 on the book jacket). And yet the sad thing was the limit of her participation in that energetic exchange. She was clearly making the connections, trying to dive in, but couldn’t get the details of the stories out. It’s hard - and one of the things about her which I miss so much. For news on a different note, Lydia turned sixteen in May and is driving - though she’s also had her first chastening accident (not really her fault - but tell that to the cops and the adjusters). The two of them persevere with theater - Oz (what again?) and Annie this summer. Lucy’s school closed on the last day of the year (the priest who connived it all misrepresents it as an archdiocesan decision) so we were left scrambling for the fall and really pleased she’ll be at Our Lady of Guadalupe - a terrific school right here in the neighborhood. (It’s newly begun by four womens’ orders, has a very integrated social justice/ literature-based curriculum, teachers we know as friends and comrades from Central America work, and though we don’t fit the poverty profile they are targeting, they are eager to have a couple Peace Community kids in the mix: what a providence!). We have two separate weeks of camp with our community this summer - and blessed days at the cabin on and off between. Let me name also some other friends in our candlelit intercessions here: ladon sheets (mendicant caller to discipleship), slipping via pancreatic cancer to the otherside in hospice care at the L.A. Worker; Chuck Mathei, with throat cancer, using the remains of his voice to train a new generation of land reform activists in Voluntown, CT; and Murphy Davis of the Open Door whose battle with Burkitt’s Lymphoma has recently yielded another victory such that she and Ed have flown off to Iona for community conversations and prayer. So. These updates, notice, always end up being a summons to prayer. Get wise to it, dear friends, and see the pitch coming. Please pray, dearest of communities. For these folks and more . For Jeanie Wylie and all of us who accompany her in the long loneliness which is at once a blessed journey, Bill