The Gift of Friendship

Where it not for these ladies, I would not be writing.

The picture that graces this post was taken at the Tabard Inn in DC on May 3, 2008. On May 3, 2007, I had my first date with the lady in white who consented on her 40th birthday to be my wife. A scant 7 months and a few days later, we were wed on the patio of the Tabard with our families and friends attending. The Reverend Ginger Gaines-Cirelli - then pastor at Capitol Hill United Methodist Church was our officient. My father, Harold Bledsoe Gill, Jr., served as my best man. Lynn’s matron-of-honor was her best friend from her high school days, Mary Horner Mottola.

Were it not for the ladies with Lynn in this picture, I probably never would have crossed paths with her, however. They took it upon themselves to set up a profile for Lynn on the dating site, eHarmony. I was using it to search for relationship in the District of Columbia and they had used Lynn’s work address rather than her actual address in Burtonsville, Maryland. I was very fortunate indeed because I cannot imagine my life without this lady as my wife. We are so well-suited to each other.

That 2007 first date ended up being a walking date around the neighborhood where we now live. I met her at a now-defunct bead store called “Beadazzled” and, I like to say, I’ve been “bedazzled” by her ever since. I selected that spot for our meeting since I knew Lynn made jewelry. She had a small business on the side called “Hanging by a Thread.” Droll, I thought, when I heard that. My mother treasures the ear-rings Lynn made for her to wear at the wedding.

Our walk took us to St. Ex, a restaurant themed on the author of “The Little Prince.” I don’t remember what I ordered, but Lynn had their calamari which wasn’t really what she expected, but she never let on that she wasn’t expecting squid with tentacles and all! We walked back to the garage where her car was under the Universal South building where the Academy for Educational Development, her employer, was then located. It was a large non-proft that worked in the field of International Development. Little did we know then that it would be no more within a few years. It was then close to 50 years old and employed around 4000. Lynn was the Associate Director of Human Resources in charge of training. She was really good at it, having innate emotional intelligence along with being exceptionally conscientious. She is still like that.

Our personalities are quite different. I am the one who is more chaotic whereas she is steady. We complement each other nicely however. I am astonished by my good luck.

The wedding party wasn’t large, but it was an elegant affair. After our first night as a married couple there at the Tabard Inn, we set out for some cabins not far from Luray, Virginia and spent a week touring the Shenandoah including Luray Caverns and Monticello before returning to the townhouse in Burtonsville.

We started trying to get pregnant, but by mid summer, Lynn started showing symptoms that took a while to diagnose. A liver biopsy eventually showed that she had “auto-immune hepatitis” which is something like lupus. She was put on prednisone and an anti-rejection drug by her 41st birthday, the latter being something pregnant women should not touch.

At 42 and a month, she suffered a brain-stem stroke that paralyzed her on the left. No more jewelry making business although for the first days in the Neuro-Critical Care Unit at Holy Cross Hospital, she was indeed “Hanging by a Thread.” We had just spent a full day doing a workshop with Carolyn Myss at the Washington Convention Center when she developed the worst headache of her life. Getting me up at 1 AM, she had me drive her to the ER where the doctors did a CT scan that failed to spot the clot in a small artery supplying an area of her brain stem. They performed a spinal tap to check for meningitis and that fact meant that once the stroke became apparent, they could not use TPA (clot-busting) drugs since it could cause waist down paralysis by creating a hematoma at the site of the spinal tap. All things being equal, it is preferable to be paralyzed on the left. She was able to get some function back and now walks with an ankle-foot orthotic bracing the left ankle and a cane in her right hand. It’s been a long road since those events of November 2009. I’m very grateful for her dogged determination to recover as much as possible.

I wrote yesterday about “Compensation” by Ralph Waldo Emerson which has been my North Star in all kinds of situations that might be seen as misfortune. In my case, I’ve been able to see the silver lining and the humor in our situation. We joke that she cannot “run out on me” and I often say that we are in a three-legged race through life. We have a lot of fun together. It is a deep disappointment to her that we aren’t able to have children of her own, but I make a habit of providing sufficient funds to Camp Winnarainbow in Laytonville, California so that a child who wouldn’t be able to go to camp can attend on a scholarship. We also are in a position to be a resource to others since we do not have child-care to worry about.

So, this post is another attempt to let all of you in the range of my writing know a bit more about who we are and what we are doing to be the change we want to see. I’m looking forward to seeing if this resonates sufficiently to get a few comments and maybe new subscribers too. Remember, every cent spent is a vote for the kind of world we are co-creating!