The light of one sweet smile: how to separate this from school, from work, from colleagues, the contagion that carries through, breezes over and around and through the lightness of the souls inhabiting this place. How one sweet smile can wrap itself around so many who walked beside this charismatic, enigmatic, energetic, and so magnetic one such as she, Rachel, our friend. We called her that, our friend, and confidant, those who shared this space of labour – an environment that many rightfully decry as all too often lacking that spirit of communion – she brought light back in, the light of one sweet smile. Her work was reading, and bringing that alive to others, so I can do no better than to interweave found lines of poetry, recirculating such words to breathe us back to her.
Even as a child, she laboured with a love of language, her earliest memory, I’ve been told, awaking from a nap to the sound of the postman delivering children’s books for her consumption. And it was all down literary lanes from then on in: president of the Book Worm club, newspaper editor way back in elementary school, maxing out her library card, perfecting the fine art of reading while out on country walks, pressing flowers within the pages of her own young poetry, visiting gravesites of too-early dead Romantics. This was her passion. But her reading, let it be said, was not a transitive act, not the simple function of a scholar taking in the world through lines upon a page. Rather, it was a reading in and through and all around, because it reached beyond these paper texts into the fibre and fabric of her multiple communities. If your coalition is comfortable, then it’s too small, wrote a filmmaker and ethnographer; yet with Rachel, she seemed able and privileged to continuously expand her reach without experiencing the pangs of overextension.
Late last night, at a loss as to what to say today, I wandered our campus, thought I’d visit Rachel’s office, perhaps to touch her door and through that reacquaint a presence. But it was late, the building locked, and so I wandered more and pondered those connections that so many of us shared with her, and wondered at the greatness of our loss, truly our collective gain, memories replete, sensate, and unlikely ever to be overshadowed.
In this quiet walk, I became resolute to not enumerate all the individuals with whom Rachel collaborated in practice because she collaborated with so many in spirit, and I feared that in her vast world, I would be bound to leave some out. But also because you are at once too many and at the same time you blend in to one another seamlessly, and also cacophonously, an endless stream of those who shared her work.
I admit, I’m nothing but a storyteller, ill-equipped to speak with any eloquence to Rachel’s true talents as a scholar and a rhetorician, and so I scuttle back to what I best know how to do, in this case, to relate a story of a first encounter, and in that telling hope to show the magic and the wisdom that has brought us here today. Many years ago, it seems, but still so fresh, I waited by the water on the coast, to meet a pair of university college profs, visiting to propose a venture to highlight how artists write about their work. Will, whom I had met some years before, arrived with Rachel (I would later find this to be one of their early forays into a multitude of projects) and we sat to share a drink and some ideas on how to bring this project to fruition. One drink became another, and the conversations merged into a dinner, an excitement rising through the possibilities afforded by this not so chance encounter. The waiter came again and Rachel asked him for a gimlet, but, she said, make mine with gin. He nodded, took his leave, and I, ever curious, asked Rachel what she meant, for were not gimlets always made with gin? Really? she said with the light of one sweet smile, and when the waiter hurried back to make a confirmation, “Ma’am, our bartend says that gimlets are with gin,” that smile pressed back and opened up and laughter served around the table, a joyous sharing that caught off-guard adjacent diners who must have thought ‘what anecdote could so utterly delight?’ I had the fortune, then, to understand what many before and since have had the pleasure to behold. There was Rachel, uninhibited, unselfconscious, laughing at and with the world, with and at herself, and all along, the spirit shared as if conspiring to trump an evil sorcerer out there somewhere, tricked out and tripped up with a wink and a smile. Not disingenuous to say that moment drew me in – and this, I know, from many others, a story shared in heart – the endless possibility that was Rachel hovering in our midst.
Like others here today, I shared delight in working side by side, tagteam teaching (a collaboration, in which students were won over by her reach and how she joined and brought together, indeed, a process transmogrified as I more recently co-taught with Cameron as, through Rachel, we have moved inexorably along that path from colleague to friend). Others wrote with her, curated shows, developed research plans and simply shared their deepest dreams, desires, over steaming cups of tea in precious moments snatched from overburdened days. And others, still, lived and died calling themselves Rachel’s friends, some without ever having met her in the flesh. Such was her virtual community of young women dealing with illness and each other, in what Rachel called their “semi-secret place to air …concerns… support each other and generally share what, for lack of a better word, [she called] ‘the journey.’” This, perhaps, her ultimate collaboration, refusing to buy into the currency of fighting against a disease that inhabited her body, but learning to live with it, in whatever manner possible. Rather than refusing to go gentle into that good night, then, she personified that trumpet of prophecy, if winter comes, can spring be far behind?
If love itself is a type of dream, and if no one can sleep forever, then we must wake into new worlds indeed. But the vestiges remain, and “love can carry on after this beautiful dream” – when she was that little girl, pressing flowers into a notebook, those are the words Rachel wrote, “love can carry on after this beautiful dream,” and even if human voices wake us, we do not drown, but sigh and sing and bask in that light of one sweet smile.
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