Linda

Linda Bartlett Cohen
1949-2010

​​I spoke the following words at Linda’s funeral.

Linda was my good friend. As members of the same Jewish fellowship or Chavurah, our families came together for holidays and annual joint vacations, to celebrate our children’s life passages, and, as the children got older, just to enjoy each other’s company.

Linda’s accident occurred years before we met. Her continuing health challenges were just part of my background experience of her. Not something we particularly addressed. 

All that changed in 2005 when Linda, then needing both a body brace and walker, painfully hobbled into a room at Washington Hospital. There she witnessed me using hypnotic techniques to help someone deal with pain. 

The hospital maintains a small rose garden and later, as we sat soothed by the sounds of the rose garden fountain, Linda suggested that we might work together. When I accepted Linda as a client, I thought I could help her. I had no idea how profoundly she would ultimately help me.

Linda wanted to reduce her drug dosage and take charge of her experience of life. I asked her what she hoped to achieve out of our professional relationship and she answered, “I am not particularly hoping to change my physical situation. I am just hoping to come to terms with it and find a sense of balance. If I can get healthy enough I hope to participate in a regimen to eliminate the Hepatitis C infection that came with the blood transfusions after my accident.”

Her goal was to find balance in life! What I did not know then, but I learned from Linda, is that achieving balance - of being in equanimity, is perhaps the highest mental state any of us can hope for in life. I am humbled both by the reach of her goal and by the challenges she had to overcome in order to achieve it.

Each week as Linda and I worked together she became lighter and more agile, her breath coming more and more easily. Our work together, our progress, and our discoveries are documented elsewhere (in the body of this book). What I want to emphasize here is how our friendship blossomed over these past five years as Linda continued to be both friend and client, both teacher and student. 

What I was struck by, in addition to her bravery, her honesty, and her brilliance, was what an amazingly thoroughly good person she was. It turns out that achieving equanimity means addressing all that we see in ourselves as good and all that we see in ourselves as bad. Often what Linda saw as her failings actually exposed a better, more caring, loving, and forgiving person than I saw in myself at my best! I treasured her example as I tried to support her ever more profound achievements while searching for and finding my own equanimity. 

Here was an angel touching my life and, in each interaction, bringing out the best in me. The word “friend” does not cover our relationship; the concept, “Spiritual-friend” comes closer. My world is somehow a much brighter place because she was part of it; right now it is a dimmer place in the absence of her blinding light.

I have to accept that God took back a friend whose work here was done, but I am not happy about it. I selfishly wanted more years with Linda, as did all of us who had received the gift of knowing her.

I can only honor her memory now by being the kind of person she taught me that I can be: One who cares for those around me with such a fierce love and with such good humor that my words ring out with blazing truth as I gratefully say, “Thank you, Linda, for touching my life.”

Alan Weiner, November, 2010