Donations in honor of Greg Sewell

From Greg's wife:

Donations in honor of our beloved Greg Sewell may be made to Millennium Promise, a community-led development project aimed at helping rural African villages lift themselves out of extreme poverty.

All donations in Greg's name will be specifically earmarked for a cluster of six villages in central Ghana, where key initiatives include bed net distribution to combat the spread of malaria; training farmers in agricultural techniques; constructing and renovating health clinics; and providing safe water.

Greg spent a life-changing year in Ghana as a volunteer, teaching computer literacy as part of his passionate belief that access to knowledge can help people create better lives for themselves. His experience in Ghana set him on a course of volunteer work and galvanized his commitment to helping others less fortunate than himself. In September he would have started a Masters degree at Columbia, specializing in international human rights. Please help us continue Greg's work and his dreams of a healthier and more peaceful Africa with your kind contribution to Millennium Promise.

To make an on-line contribution in memory of Greg, please visit the Millennium Promise website.

Mark the box, “Check if you would like to make an honor or memorial gift.” Once “memorial gift” has been selected, please enter in Greg’s name in the space provided.

To make a donation by cheque, please make cheque out to Millennium Promise and send to:

Millennium Promise
Attn: Cassandra Ryan
432 Park Avenue South, 13th Floor
New York, NY 10016

*Please add “In memory of Greg Sewell” in the memo line.

With deepest gratitude at this time of our incalculable loss,
Frances

And from me (Bill) thank you all for your kind comments and well wishes. They've been very comforting to many people.

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RIP, Greg Sewell

"When I come back, I'll roll around in it." That's what Greg wrote to me from Ghana in 2003, speaking of our lush green suburban lawn, such a far cry from the dusty sandlots of Accra.

And I so wanted him to do so. But dragging a cosmopolitan like Greg from one of his cities -- London, New York, Toronto, Accra, Doha -- was like pulling a tooth from a healthy person. I knew he wanted to come up this way, but I also knew he couldn't. He was of Brooklyn. Once you move out of that environment, you see how hard it is to entice someone from the city north, especially someone without a car.

And so we didn't overlap as we once did. Even in New York, it was hard for the metropolitan woman who shared my apartment and me to meet up with our friends. We lived in Rego Park, they lived in Williamsburg and Prospect Heights. On occasion after the Lad was born we would eat bagels and drink mimosas, talk about politics, watch the marathon go by. We still felt mobile, they still seemed like our circle. But we moved, and our contact became sporadic, thrice-yearly. Nevertheless, even without direct replacement in our new geographic lives, these earlier ties remained just as important.

And then, this. Our dear Greg -- he who trod lightest upon the social circle, being somehow central to it but seeming least invested -- has left us. Pneumonia followed by sepsis followed by complications, and after thirteen days of valiant battle, Greg moved on. Irreligious and unapologetic, Greg had other plans for death, it's fair to say. He lived well, and savored, and immersed himself -- especially in music -- and was too young to ship.

The other day, when things looked particularly bad for Greg, I stepped out of my office in its office park and stood by the trunk of a willow that leaned far out over a constructed streamlet. This tree is older than the buildings, I think, with its thickset trunk and myriad branches. As I stared, it transformed into a lung. Its trunk drew sustenance from the earth and spread it into the leaves. Sure, maybe I had it backwards -- the leafy tendrils drew in carbon dioxide and transferred it to the wood, and my forced parallel to Greg's condition was just that. However, I took a few deep breaths and thought of my breath entering Greg's lungs, and I thanked the tree for its gift of oxygen. Connection of any sort, a tether in unmoored times.

In the past two weeks I've seen an outpouring of love and goodwill that tells me something: Greg made this. As a volunteer, coordinator, consultant, Greg's metier has been to give people a small gift of light, whether they be schoolchildren struggling to enter the modern capitalist consumer society, or victims of its worst excesses. Charm, erudition, wit, arty glasses -- Greg was someone to whom you wished to be close. By his very life itself, Greg created this outpouring of love, which only seems sudden in light of his death. It was there, a constant, during his life, even, and especially, toward the end. But there from the beginning, else the end could not have happened as it did.

Greg left us surrounded by love, borne someplace on love's cushion, drawing love forth from his friends and family, generating a gigantic gyre of loving feeling and goodwill from around the world, a violent light of love calling him to health and recovery but acknowledging the possibility of his passing, and celebrating all with equal recognition of his life. Greg is gone, but that love can only be spent among we who remain. I'm pouring forth my share to all who hear me.

Today the crocuses and hostas are pushing up. The daffodils are starting their green rise. The air is warm, the sky that particular shade of spring blue. And the grass, the grass is greening. It misses Greg, the grass does, and calls out for the shape of him to mold its contours and to lie briefly remembered in its embrace.

As he lies in ours, remembered, loved, always.



















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A Great Sadness: RIP, area child

I hate to type this, but if I don't write it out there ain't nothin' else. A seven-year-old boy from the area died of the flu this past Sunday. He apparently had a history of asthma.

I've never had even a taste of the pain his parents must be going through, but the fear wells up as I type, listening to my own asthmatic son coughing in his bed down the hall. We've taken every precaution and that's all the comfort I can muster.

RIP, young man. And may your parents be well.


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RIP, Our Gruff Cousin, the Bear

From time to time, a bear will wander through an area neighborhood, get treed by someone's cockapoo, knock down all the garbage cans on the street, eat the last pork chop off the grill, and go back into the woods to sleep it off. As mentioned before, where we used to live — about twenty-five minutes south of here — one wandered into our back yard the Friday before Labor Day, upsetting us as we sipped summer's last gins and tonic.

Last week, a couple of miles from there, a hunter shot a bear that will likely set the archery record for a bear in New York State. It weighed 626 pounds and was about seven feet long. Here's essentially how he did it. He got his bear license, waited for the first day of bow-hunting season, wandered out into his back yard, followed the bear into the woods, and gave it the ol' twangeroo.

On the one hand: "'[The bear] usually came out during the time that the kids got on the bus, so it was kind of scary,' Joy said."

On the other hand: "...[He] came within 45 feet of the bear, which was busy eating acorns and berries....[and] released an arrow that pierced its heart and lung."

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RIP, Sean O'Neill

The city of Utica, New York, was the scene of a massive race a week ago Sunday, with more than 10,000 people running 15 kilometers in the annual festival/race called the Boilermaker. Sadly, one young runner fell victim to a previously-undetected heart arrhythmia and collapsed on the course. He was pronounced dead at a hospital a short time later.

Several of his friends ran the last 3 1/2 miles for him a few days afterwards.

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Seeing the Shadow

Dennis the Skunk trundled purposefully along the bank of the Quassaick. The days of warm weather had lured him out of the den, that first scent of spring knocking at the doors and calling him forth. Winter’s not gone, he thought as the dusk descended, but it had rained, and the rain was working its way into the soil and loosening the grip of the cold. The water was high. Dennis left tracks in the sand near the creek mouth where it opened into the Hudson.

Upstream, unheard, a chunk of ice broke free from the bank, carrying with it a four-inch-thick tree limb with a cruelly hooked and broken fork. Dennis, nose-deep in a hollow carved out by the stream, looking for something tender to eat, didn’t see it coming. It caught him by the hind leg and swept him into the flood. He swam for a moment, but was lost. All that night a vicious wind blew, and the day dawned frigid.

Tonight, as our ferry crossed from Beacon to Newburgh, half a mile from either shore, the unmistakable aroma of skunk took over the cabin.



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Losses

In the one long conversation I ever had with him, a wise man once asked me what my ideal job was. I’d never really considered the question in precisely that simple a way; any time I’d tried before, the chorus of roadblocks would drown out the vision before it could even form. So he asked me, and I thought about it, and pushed aside doubts and realism and drafted a fantasy version of how I’d like to spend my days. I’ve kept it, and kept it in mind. And although some of the roadblocks are real, in that I need to feed people and I enjoy the furor of my job, there are elements in that dream vision that I have chased in the two years since he and I spoke. One of those, for instance, was starting a blog.

This weekend a family friend – one of my wife’s contemporaries – passed away too young and with too much yet to do. We drove three hours to the funeral, returning through fog, rain and traffic with children in tow, arriving exhausted and burdened with sadness that clung to us all. I picked up the paper on the front step and brought it in, opened it and was further saddened to read of the passing of that wise man. In a very real way, Mike Levine taught me to dream a little.

May they both rest in peace. I’ll try not to waste the lesson.



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