This poem for My Beloved Chrissy, given at our Celebration of Chrissy’s Life – July 16, 2023, at the home of my dear friends Jane & Tim on North June Street in Hancock Park, Los Angeles, CA.
Chrissy is the essence of joy, love, empathy, acute instinctive sensitivity to all living beings she encounters, most notably fellow sapiens, felines and canines…
I was able to observe over the years that we were together how she and her cat Lilly seemed at times to be linked consciousness… While Chrissy slept on her side, Lilly would somehow manage to rest elevated on Chrissy’s side.
While I saw this phenomenon repeatedly, the novelty of its reality never quite lost its sense of improbability.
Chrissy’s existence was filled with this element of improbabilities…
While we were, even after our first few years together, so deeply bound and interconnected to each other as to have a natural continuous state of mutual fulfillment, I was never able to fully comprehend the overwhelming sense of awe of her… Awe of how it was possible that such a one as Chrissy could actually be, much less be so intertwined and indescribably interwoven into my being.
We had become a joint consciousness, on the one hand fully in sync and inseparable, yet at the same time fully respecting each other’s space.
Looking back on it now, I am inclined with my rational scientific mind to question how such a joint consciousness could be an actually experienced reality… Yet I still have the visceral palpable sense of the fact that Chrissy and I were One, ARE ONE.
In thinking of it now, I can see and feel in my mind’s eye the sense of wonder I felt seeing the Milky Way in the Himalayas or in the middle of the Algerian Sahara, and the visceral sense I experienced of being at one with the universe.
Chrissy brought this sense of fulfillment to my existence for virtually all of the 15 years we were so gifted to have lived with each other in mutual life fulfillment, and even now as I write these words, I feel that same sense of fulfillment and indivisibility and overwhelming joy and love that the life force also known as Christine Anne Clark Geary was totally with and in me.
This overwhelming visceral sense of fulfillment feels undiminished.
Chrissy had the capacity to look.
Into people’s hearts
And she loved them.
Chrissy had the incomparable ability
To find the soul in people
And embrace it.
How she managed to do this
So seemingly effortlessly,
So naturally.
So instinctively
Time after time
Seemingly to perfection,
Is something that I have seen in wonderment…
As people encountered us and
Fell in love with her…
For years was I able to witness
This living breathing Empath.
For years was I able to marvel at
How such a thing could be.
But not comprehend how.
This other mortal being
Was so continuously able to
So seemingly instantly see into
Other people, feel what they feel,
And be able to even draw them out.
So that they were able
To love themselves more than
They were able to do so,
Before Chrissy entered their lives.
I saw time after time
How Chrissy had this
Instinctive knack, talent
To make people feel better about themselves.
How is such a manner of being possible?
How can one petite and
Ostensibly normal though beautiful
Lady have these observable
Attributes which might be
Objectively viewed as being
Beyond the scope of normal humans?
Chrissy is more like an outlier
In our species sapiens.
Chrissy is gifted with senses that.
We other humans cannot fathom.
I once witnessed a kind of
Physical validation that Chrissy
Was, is, an exceptional sort of being.
Chrissy had misplaced her wallet.
It had been missing for about a week.
I was sitting on the edge of the bed in our bedroom.
Chrissy walked in the door to my right, took a step, and then seemed to fly or be propelled as if connected to a bungee cord and literally flew past me with her right arm outstretched and her hand propelled to the space behind the short stumpy leg of the couch against the wall in our bedroom, and she retrieved her missing wallet… Which had been hidden and completely obscured behind that stumpy leg and under the couch.
Chrissy and I looked at each other in disbelief as she held up her missing wallet.
We subsequently spoke rarely of this strange-beyond-the-realm-of-possibility occurrence, though each of us knew that this was a kind of physical shared experience that lent physical proof to the fact that Chrissy possessed some sort of powers that were beyond the range of normal human knowledge or comprehension.
Sometime after our first few years together, Chrissy shared with me an experience when she was about 12.
It was about a close relative who lived in Reno, while Chrissy and her family were living in LA. Chrissy had a strong sense around 1 or 2 in the afternoon that there was something wrong with this close relative in Reno, and Chrissy told her mom. About 4 or 5 hours later, her mom got a call that this relative had died earlier that day, just at the time that Chrissy had sensed it.
Chrissy later mentioned that her mom was aware of this sort of 6th sense in Chrissy and of some history of this in her mom’s family.
Chrissy felt a deep sense of self awareness about this capacity that she had to be able to have these kinds of prescient feelings, but she was quite emphatic that she was not inclined to work on developing these extraordinary capabilities. She had a strong sense that she was intent on living her life as a regular girl, without resorting to the use of any special powers. This is not something that we ever spoke about with anyone.
I hope that Chrissy is OK with my sharing this with you now.
I’ve only very recently come to realize that
Chrissy had reached a level of
The Practice of Empathy
That may prevail in perhaps 5 or 10
Fellow sapiens on our earth…
Chrissy’s practice of Empathy was at times enlivening and restorative.
And at other times exhausting and draining for her.
Chrissy had 13 major surgeries from the age of 18 to 31.
She knew that life was precious.
She knew that she was lucky to be alive.
And her reaction to this revelation at so young an age was to develop a personal approach to living of life to the fullest, interwoven with sensitivity, empathy and love to excess.
Cantorbury Tales 
Peace and God Bless
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