Hallelujah Crocodile: Blue Boogie for Ellen
by
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These words come from a place of no words. I am trying to understand something. Something larger than its name. On April 8, 1994, Ellen Manson died of respiratory failure as a complication of non-Hodgkins lymphoma. She was the older of my two daughters. Finding words for an event, I appear to manage it, exert control. But the thing, the event is diminished by the attempt to quantify. Loudness that is not a sound dims when it is named; grief acquires a shape and outline, and I do not want it muted or whittled down, this huge presence that is my companion, my familiar. It is what I have. What I know I have. Ellen was twenty-eight when she died, and we had unfinished business the two of us, issues, struggles, love left unsaid. Therefore, I was pledged to create something perfect and finished as her life - and our love for each other - were not. I wanted to write a song, but I am not a musician, and in any case that is not the right word. Used about a person who has died, 'song' is too serious and soulful, does not capture the glint in Ellen's eyes of fire and trouble. No, a simple melody - the beautiful young woman, face of an angel, taken early back to heaven - won't do. The story is more complicated. The smile that could light up a room masked a personal darkness, an escort of private demons. But in the midst of whatever haunted her, Ellen knew how to shine - party, and laugh, and shine. In her twenty-eight years she just about did it all. It's important to remember that, too. There is more: From the moment of Ellen's death I wanted to find her spirit, and thought I could. Made that assumption. Others have seen ghosts and angels, heard voices, glimpsed the other side. Skeptics and unbelievers have been ravished by visions; why not also the cynical, doubting and desperate me? When I began again, after many years, to pray, I prayed that Ellen's ghost would appear. I prayed for some sign, something I could regard as believable in the 'real' world, proof that there really was another 'side', a continuity to which I belonged. But whatever I created, Ellen was to be the center. What I had to say I would say to Ellen, for her, about her. And at almost every step my subconscious betrayed me. The more I looked for Ellen, the more I found I was looking for myself. The book, try as I might to keep it to a chosen heading, kept veering toward the magnetic of my own preoccupations. After a struggle, I gave in. Then like looking at a landscape rolling away from the crest of a hill, I begin to see that once I peel away the multiple layers of grief and guilt then will I be able to show my love. But not before. I remind myself that words have a music of their own. I will invoke this music, the many names for loss, the something broken whose pieces move farther and farther apart like shards of a bowl carelessly kicked. I will sing my love and our laughter. I will sing her childhood, an evening of summer music, the shadows and the light. I will sing her smile. Hallelujah Crocodile, can I learn to sing her demons? Can I sing them out of her? Out of me? I will tell the things that have happened and keep happening, the mostly small occurrences that help me live in a world without Ellen, when I thought for a time I could not. I will sing this confusion of motives. I will sing the journey. Ellen, I imagine us sitting together as we did when you were a child, your small hands opening a book and us reading it together. This is for you, Babe. This is our lullaby, requiem, and boogie dance.
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About the Book
Hallelujah Crocodile Blue Boogie for Ellen
In 1989, the author's older daughter was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. After a four-year remission the cancer returned. Ellen Manson died April 8, 1994. At the time, mainstream media was almost routinely covering stories of angel sightings and near-death experiences. Says the author, "I wanted to be in touch with Ellen, but this seemed to presuppose very specific beliefs in a spiritual reality. How did one enter such a reality without adopting the tenets of traditional religions and philosophies?" In contemplating her daughter's death, the author began to think about her own: What does it mean that we all physically die? What is death? She asks age-old questions and looks for answers in her own direct experience.
After three years of trying on evenings and weekends to write this memoir-tribute-song, Manson realized that such a book required her best energies; she needed to make some life changes. The first was to leave her job. In August 1997 she went home to her computer and began to write full time.
Hallelujah Crocodile Blue Boogie for Ellen is the result. Part biography, part philosophical exploration, it is a work of discovery. Says Manson, "As I 'found' Ellen, I began to find myself."
About the Author
Julie Stevens Manson was born on the east coast and moved to California in 1969. She has worked as a newspaper reporter, freelance editor, and communications coordinator for a national retail and mail order company. Three years after the death of her older daughter from cancer, Julie left her job to write, think, and try to understand her changed world. To generate income while she wrote her book, Julie started YourStory Word Works, a writing and editorial services business. Taking a break means hiking from a trailhead near her apartment; Julie also enjoys opera, choral concerts, and camping with friends. She is training for her black belt in kenpo karate.