Found this on Google and thought it most interesting so am posting it... on a moderate thread... I hope.
The other side of the coin..and a diversion from the Bush/Kerry debacles... and over one BILLION spent thus far on the?campaigns. Aren't there more important things ?
A HUMAN INTEREST STORY.
WEB EXCLUSIVE
By Melinda Henneberger
Newsweek
Updated: 8:43 p.m. ET Aug. 20, 2004
Aug. 20 - I had no strong opinion on gay marriage until recently, and probably avoided thinking about the issue too much in order to keep it that way. I have a completely traditional view of my own marriage and was content to put all other relationships under the heading of “Not My Business.” Easy, right? Well, no, as it turns out.
Because now my friend Jeannette is in love and wants to get married again. If you knew her, you’d want to dance at that wedding, too.
One morning, six years ago this July, I walked into the office, picked up my messages and listened to a voicemail from another friend of Jeannette’s, informing me that a Manhattan tour bus had run a red light and in an instant, killed her family—her wonderful husband, Peter, a sculptor, and their incredible 12-year-old son Morgan—as they crossed the street in front of the Flatiron Building.
Peter had been walking Morgan to school and they were holding hands, according to witnesses, who said the bus never even slowed down.
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I’ll never forget walking with Jeannette to the funeral—so slowly, because she had to force herself to keep walking. It was a beautiful service, at our old parish, St. Francis Xavier in New York’s Chelsea neighborhood. Afterward, we came back to her apartment, still filled with her guys’ art and books and mess. We had a drink at the little table where Peter had once brought us a bunch of different kinds of olives he was all excited about—Peter was the kind of guy who could love an olive—to have with our martinis.
The unfortunate things people say on these occasions are a useful distraction, so we talked about the woman at the funeral who had been declaring that Jeannette would soon be one of the most sought-after women in New York, and was not too old to have more children, too, if she wanted. Never, she said. Never.
I was not much better, as I recall, telling her over and over what an amazing job she had done as a wife and mother, putting Peter through school and devoting nearly full time to fighting with school bureaucrats to get Morgan, who had autism, every bit of the help he needed. When she answered that she knew she had done all she could for them, it was just the truth.
After about a year, Jeannette said that she no longer felt that the earth might swallow her up at any moment. She didn’t ever want to move away from the home she had shared with Peter and Morgan, but she did redecorate the place and went back to school, eventually earning a master’s degree in social work.
I knew even before she told me that on 9/11 and for days after, she would be at St. Vincent’s Hospital downtown, where they had brought the bodies of Morgan and Peter. She volunteered there after the Twin Towers came down, trying to get the families of those still missing to eat something. She said she recognized the frozen look that so many New Yorkers wore for a long while after that as one she’d seen in her mirror; they were all living in her country, suddenly, at least for a time.
She did grief counseling for a couple of years, and worked in a hospice where she witnessed a lot of healing and grace at life’s end. Now she has a job counseling rape victims—not because she is comfortable in the dark but because it’s her gift to know how to help people out of places they don’t want to be.
When we met for dinner the other evening, for the first time in a couple of years, I saw that she, too, was much changed—softened and stilled in a way I would never have thought possible. This was not the old Jeannette, of course, because that woman is never coming back. Yet this summer, on the anniversary of the accident, she was even able to watch some old videos, of Morgan in a school play and Peter with some of his students—and laugh, really laugh. In fact, she said she was happier than she’d ever believed she could be again, thanks in part to her new partner, Jenny.
(I should probably make clear here, only because I don’t want to leave the misimpression that this is a case of late-onset posttraumatic-stress homosexuality, that Jeannette had had girlfriends before Peter, too.)
When they can, she said hopefully, she and Jenny would like to marry. And who could deny her the happiness of publicly proclaiming this miracle? I couldn’t; that’s all I know.
© 2004 Newsweek, Inc.
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