Losing Ed to Parkinson’s Disease a year ago April remains a personal loss to me. And to so many other people, students and community who shared his presence within the past half century.
I met Ed and Claire Blatchford in 2000. I came to know them very well, each in their own persona. For them, listening to each other — and to others — was deeper than simply hearing the other’s words. Ed and Claire were a profoundly unparalleled partnership.
I was first introduced to the deeply spiritual persona of Ed and Claire 20 years ago when my sister and I were part of a circle of people who met in the Blatchford’s back yard or living room. The discussions were always about what many call the soul. Subsequent dinners of the four of us at their home at the entrance to High Ledges Wildlife Sanctuary took those discussions to an even more personal level.
Ed was the co-founder and principal of the Four Rivers Charter Public School which opened in 2003. Two years earlier Ed had asked me to join the board of the Four Rivers Educational Foundation (FREF). FREF would become the financial support entity that enabled the founding of Four Rivers. The school’s emphasis on character development for moral and social responsibility in the context of its three central themes — nature, technology and community — reflect Ed’s lifelong passion for holistic education. Prior to starting Four Rivers, he and Claire ran the alternative Uplook School, also in Greenfield.
Claire is the author of six books. In her book “Turning,” she invites the reader to have the courage of contacting the spirit directly, as it speaks within their own hearts. Our spirit is near, she writes, and we need only turn toward it, ask from our hearts, and listen. There’s that word again — “listen.”
Now, in Claire’s latest book — “Unraveling>Reweaving: Passing Through and Beyond Parkinson’s” — readers have been given the gift of knowing Ed and Claire on an even more intimate and greater spiritual level.
If anything can come close to describing Ed and Claire as a couple, it is her statement that “…we always believed, even before PD [shorthand for Parkinson’s Disease], that we are quite a bit more than human beings with physical brains and bodies.” Later in her book she emphasizes that Ed and she always believed that “…one isn’t just a physical body with a physical brain, that may undergo decline and malfunction; one also has soul and a spirit which are capable of transcendent love and expanding consciousness, both within and without of the physical body.”
Anyone who knew Ed and Claire for more than a day found this to be true. To get an idea of what Claire means by their “relationship,” a reader first learns that Ed and Claire have been married almost 52 years. “I’m profoundly deaf,” Claire writes, “since having mumps at the age of six. Ed was the kindest man I’d ever met when we met at the age of 22. At the heart of this kindness was the fact that my deafness was never a limiting factor in the relationship. Without any fanfare or fuss, Ed helped me find my home in the hearing world. He knew me as a person rather than primarily as a deaf person.” Claire wrote “We were so attuned, we often thought of the same thing at the same moment and regularly finished each other’s sentences.” There may be many couples that can claim that same synchronicity which Claire acknowledges by saying “I’ve experienced this with other people also, not just with Ed.”
This takes me back to one hot afternoon on Colrain Road as Claire and I “trained” for the 60-mile Avon breast cancer walk in May 2002. We were walking, sweating and talking about John Gardner who had been Claire’s mentor for over 30 years. It was a three-way conversation as the two of us walked and talked with Claire channeling Gardner.
Claire writes that she and Ed “…both knew when we were having inspired and inspiring conversations and would emerge from them feeling in complete agreement not only with each other but with something larger.” It is the “something larger” that has my attention now in my 85th year.
“It is primarily the unraveling of our relationship that I want to share” Claire writes, “…as a challenge to stay open, open to other ways of discovering connection, relationship and love when the body and brain are obviously faltering, failing, stopping.”
Columnist John Bos is a Greenfield resident. He continues to serve on the Four Rivers Educational Foundation board of directors. His column Connecting the Dots appears bi-weekly. Questions and comments are welcomed at john01370@gmail.com.