Rachel’s Community and Her Tahiti
By Colin Reese
Speech given at Rachel’s memorial service
TESC March 22, 2003
It’s so good to see so many people who love Rachel. There are a lot of people here I don’t know so to introduce myself I’ll just say that Rach and I were together off and on for the last 5 years. You know how that goes. We had a little apartment here in Olympia where, even when we weren’t “together”, she was always welcome. We will always remain best friends.
Mostly what I will talk about will be creativity, community, rebirth. These are the ways that I remember Rachel the fondest and they are some of the things about her that made her great. But lest I be accused of idealizing her—which Rachel hated and I will do a lot of anyway, I want to say right off that she was one of the messiest people I know. She never did her dishes. And while she could organize people so well, her closets were a nightmare.
When I first met Rachel in 1998, she was heavily under the influence of Paul Gaugain. See, Rachel had an incredibly vibrant inner life. She was continuously engaged with her imagination. She listened to her dreams. It’s probably this quality of hers that I can ultimately thank for the time she spent with me. Shortly after I met her, Rachel told me that she had had several dreams about me in the weeks before we met. I think this impressed her. It must have, because at the time I was not exactly a “catch”. I was extremely confused and lost back then. And I think she was a little lost and confused too. Hence she started dating me. And as I said, Rachel was heavily under the influence of Paul Gaugain. But I didn’t realize this. Rachel, I think, had found a companion in him. His bright colors, his compassion, his imagination... these things struck home with her. And I think she was enthralled by the idea of traveling to a remote island and creating something new. It was this that started a train of thought that would develop and change over the passing years. This is the genesis of Rachel’s “imaginary Tahiti”. But I knew nothing of this then.
Sometime in the first few weeks of our relationship, we were lying around talking in her little studio apartment on Adams Street. I don’t recall the conversation, but I remember she was staring at me with her bright eyes and it made me uncomfortable. I hid my face in the crook of my elbow and she playfully asked me where I was hiding. “Tahiti”, I said. And I think this is when Rachel opened up to me. See, she listened to her dreams and her imagination. She looked for little coincidences and in her mind she turned them into signs. I think Rachel took this “Tahiti” I said as a sign that we were meant for each other. I look back now and I am so grateful I didn’t say “Galapagos” or “Cuba”.
Some months later, Rachel wrote me a letter—“Colin, there’s a planet floating in a purple reality somewhere and there’s a Tahiti on the planet with fat versions of you and me playing on the beaches. We both wear mumus all the time or just hang out naked because we’re too fat to wear anything else. And we play scrabble and write haiku all night and sing to each other with congas and banjos and watch Dr. Strangelove again and again. And we drag each other out on the roof to watch the sunset and we break the roof because we’re too fat and we fall through into our king sized bed... and over and over again we fix the roof and fall through it again because we are so in love with the sunset and fixing roofs never phases us... and we catch fireflies and have babies and raise them as circus clowns... and I write you the longest love poem. And you cry. We both cry all the time over the taste of avocados and the sun setting in the ocean over the parabolas of each others cheekbones and eyebrows over how lucky we are, over haiku—and we eat each others tears and cry because they taste so good. And we never leave each other because nobody else anywhere can make us laugh so hard. Yes. I believe in that reality. I want to go to that Tahiti when I die.”
That was Rachel aged 19, in one of many letters where she broke up with me. She broke up with me a lot. That first part of our relationship was very confused. Our worlds shrank when we fell in what we thought at the time was love, our worlds got so small that Rachel’s Tahiti included just two people. That makes me sad now. Today I can look back and see that those were some of the darkest times in our lives. Rachel would be embarrassed to have that paragraph read, because she has grown so much since then. Her love has become so great.
I think of it like this, love is a function of community, and by community I mean the interwoven lives of the people our love and kindness have touched. However big your community is, to that degree are you loved and capable of loving. And this is a cliché, but some clichés are oft-said for a reason, love like a fire illuminates our lives and in the time when Rachel’s Tahiti had just two people in it her life was like a vast dark space with only a single candle illuminating it. Over the years, my greatest privilege has been to see her life get brighter as her community has grown so much.
In fact, it has grown so big, there was so much to your life Rachel, that there isn’t time yet to recount every important detail. And in many ways, as I write this, I’m getting the feeling that I’m trying to learn lessons from you that I should have learned years ago. I think though, that there is no reason to rush. I’ll never stop trying to learn from you. You have taught me so much already, and I will try and stick to that.
A side note, as I write this there are police lights flashing across the street and a protest in front of the Olympian. I hear shouting and megaphones and my neighbor is blasting Fugazi to support their efforts. Rachel, I know, is wondering what I am doing inside writing about her. She is, as always, searching for the bridge between the comfort and love of her community and action in solidarity with the oppressed people of the world. She’s probably laughing at me.
I remember sometime last summer when we were in this “trying to save our relationship” period. We spent far too many nights “trying to save our relationship” and ultimately I think that was why we broke up. We were talking that night, and Rachel always used to be sad that I couldn’t cry in front of her... I think I had forgotten how it had been so long... and the thought of my best friend being away from me for a long time made a tear fall down my cheek. Rachel stuck out her finger and caught it and quickly put it in her mouth. She then grabbed a journal, there were always a few around, and wrote down something like “July 17th 2002... Colin sheds a tear and Rachel promptly eats it”.
See Rachel, you taught me so much about how to live. Forever, because of you, it will be ok for me to cry. I will picture you smiling and eating my tears. For me, you will be the angel who eats tears, the one who dries my eyes when I am finished being sad. And lest I be accused of idealizing you, you will be the messiest of all my angels.
Some times I try and picture where you are and what you are doing now. It’s beautiful really. I see your imagination and your love slowly diffusing into the world. I see you as free. I see you returned to the well of creativity from which you sprang. And I wonder what you’ll become. You are so playful Rachel. You taught me the value of found objects. I found this from you... I think you must have left it here to give me an image of you to hold on to. In the corner is a little brightly colored drawing and it reads—
“This is what I look like at night when I turn into a tropical fish and swim in the coral. I look like an underwater comet maybe an ornate badminton birdie or a soft chunk of animated abalone shell... I go out at dusk. I am so small and flexible I can swim between the branches of the sea fans and not fracture even a twig.”
I see Rachel now being rocked gently back and forth by the current of the ocean, in a forest of coral and sea life, finally experiencing something she had missed while she had a body. A part of Rachel always wanted to be small, so small that she could pass through the world without being noticed. And yet, this is so different from the image people have of her now, Rachel the activist. And I think the difference is reconcilable. Rachel, though she yearned to be free and comforted by the beauty around her, nevertheless realized that as a person she needed to work to help other people find the true freedom and beauty that she knew existed. I think she recognized that she had work to do. Rachel could never allow herself to drift off into the comfort she knew was possible for her because, for her, to do so while others suffered was reprehensible. And she learned over the course of her life that one of the most potent ways to affect change in society was through the power of a community. I look out now at this gathering of people and I see many of those who made up Rachel’s community. In this room are the people who shared their lives and love with her. And we can be proud, because in many ways it was the strength of this community that created a person as wonderful and unique as Rachel.
But Rachel’s community has changed in the last few days. We have all watched the light of Rachel’s life grow so much brighter by the countless people across the globe who now consider her family. Rachel’s community has become global, and I am so happy for that because I believe that when a person dies, love for them is like a light welcoming them home... they are able to be anywhere someone that loved them is and they are able to experience everything that someone who loved them has experienced and I see Rachel so joyful at the infinite possibilities she has before her now. She spans the globe, and at the same time is a part of us all.
I see her drifting back and forth through the reef of her Tahiti. And I picture her with her entire community now, so much better than what she had picked for herself 5 years ago in her letter to me, you’ve grown so much Rachel, her entire community around her on her island. I see her grandmother there, I see Craig and Cindy and Sarah and Kelly and Chris and Jazleen. I see Butch and Claudia and Brigid, I see her extended family. And I hear banjos and congas and I hear the laughter coming from her island. I see all the food she likes and spread around everyone are her drawings and her poems and everyone is so joyful. I see Kim and Christy and Josh and Todd and I see her rockstar friend Chad who she was always at war with and I see Larry and Therese and Lynn and Ann and off into the distance there are countless people. I see the good doctor who held her as she died and her friends Will and Joe and everyone else who worked with her in Rafah. I see the children who love her there and I see all those who love her here. I see the Palestinians who consider her family and I see the school children here who cried for her when they heard she wasn’t coming back. I see her coworkers at HDH and all the drop-in clients whose lives she touched and who touched her life. And everyone is completely unconcerned with names because they know that there is enough time on this island for them to get to know each person completely and to dance with everyone and eat everything again and again. No one on this island will ever have to repair anything twice because there are enough people to do it for them. And on this island I see Rachel, as she ties her hair back so she can eat more avocados and grow more fat and then dance with everyone again and again. And she is there with her new boyfriend Stefan and I am there with my new girlfriend Michelle and we all approve and from this world, from up here, I watch this island slowly recede until I can barely hear the music anymore and I look out at this crowd and I ask why we don’t spend the time we have together working to build this kind of world and I hear Rachel whisper to me that the first step is to help people to stop killing each other and destroying each others houses. We have such a great opportunity now to build on our community. Rachel would laugh at us for talking about her so much when what she really wants us to do is educate ourselves and each other, organize, and do whatever we can to stop hurting people... here, in Palestine, and around the world. Rachel I miss you so much. We miss you. We are lucky to have loved you and to have been loved by you. I love you. We love you. We miss you.