Georgia On My Mind

SAN FRANCISCO California—(Weekly Hubris)—1 March 2022—On December 24, 2021, I lost a dear friend, but I didn’t know it. The name on Caller ID that day was unfamiliar, and I didn’t pick up. It was her son calling to tell me of her passing. While I know Georgia’s son’s name, the name on the ID was not his but that of one of his relatives.

I didn’t find out until December 26, because, for the first time in many years, I was able to spend Christmas just the way I love to spend it: quietly, surrounded by light, music, immersed in a book, and completely disengaged from the world.

My departed friend, Georgia May, was a beacon of light, a beautiful soul, wise and exemplary in her acceptance of the tragedies that befell her in her life. She smiled through the pain of her physical ailments, her mind sharp and inventive even in her nineties.

Georgia was a Jungian psychologist who, with a friend, spearheaded Joseph Campbell’s series, Mythos, later acquired by Bill Moyers.

She edited her husband’s, Rollo May’s, books. Theirs was a love story that made one believe in love stories.

Georgia’s deep love of Rollo illuminated her life even after his death. It’s because of this that I mourn her passing but do not grieve. For somewhere in my deep sense of knowing—that knowing centered in the heart rather than the mind—I feel that she’s joined Rollo’s spirit and is fulfilled.

I shall miss her terribly. I’ll miss our long and wonderful talks about art, myths, life, beauty, sorrow, and so much more.

Georgia’s wisdom and compassion infused our exchanges and so did her seemingly endless empathy. Her insights into psychological dilemmas were stunningly accurate.

She would laugh that wonderful laugh when I’d point this out. And we agreed that empathic healing emanates from a depth of experience with the trials we’d endured, of the pain we, ourselves, had suffered.

Her son, Stuart, who called on December 24^th, and whom I consider a friend, is a poet whose poetry reflects a deep understand of the human condition I believe he inherited from his mother.

After I called Stuart, I recalled my last conversation with Georgia. We discussed the subtext in my writing, its roots drawing from the violence I’d witnessed and experienced as a child. I mentioned that I believed the art of each period in history—and I included writing in this—not only reflects the artist’s history but also taps into the consciousness of the artist’s times. Their work is often prophetic, and a resolute record of the ethos of their eras.

Always the good psychologist, Georgia asked me why I believed this. It was her way of directing me towards clarity. I knew this. She’d done it so often before. I thought for a while and replied by quoting Sarah Winman’s book, Still Life: “Art versus humanity is not the question. One doesn’t exist without the other. Art is the antidote.”

Georgia asked me to repeat the quote, and said she liked it very much. Then she asked if there was a piece of art which I felt reflected our present. Immediately, I replied, “It’s a painting from the last century, which, tragically, will always be relevant: Picasso’s Guernica.

“Interesting,” Georgia replied, softly.

And with that one word she led me to see the root of the recurring theme of all my writing, a deep-seated need to remind anyone who might read what I write that, if we’re not careful, Guernica will continually be relevant to every period in our future, and the future of our children.

Recalling this, I sat in silence for quite a while, looking out at the Pacific through my rain-swept window, and it seemed somehow significant that Georgia chose to leave this world at the close of 2021—a significance that is floating about in my mind searching for words to define it. Perhaps Georgia’s spirit will gently lead me to an answer as she always had in life. Or perhaps her wisdom will allow me to see that the significance of our entrances and exits from this realm of existence must always remain a wonder that cannot be defined.

All that matters at this moment is the immense gratitude I feel for having known her.