The Ninth Street Center: Laurie Bell

*DEAN:*	You're the daughter of a somewhat well-known father, William Weinstone.
*LAURIE:*	My father was one of the founders of the American Communist Party, but he was not conventionally well-known, except by people who know the history of the labor movement and the political left.
*DEAN:*	What period of history does this span?
*LAURIE:*	From the early 1900's well into the fifties when he was in jail.
*DEAN:*	How did they get him in jail? What did he do?
*LAURIE:*	They used the Smith Act to claim that an article he wrote constituted a conspiracy to advocate the forcible overthrow of the government. And he was a teacher.
*DEAN:*	I suppose somewhere there are files that could be opened to inspection by the Freedom of Information Act if someone wanted to learn more about this.
*LAURIE:*	It's all on record. He had a tremendous library, and all his papers and books are at Fairleigh Dickinson. They have everything from his books and papers and writings to his personal letters to me when he was in jail.
*DEAN:*	What was it like growing up as the daughter of a famous communist who was in jail?
*LAURIE:*	On a level of day to day living, it was challenging, let me use that word. I was followed around by the FBI.
*DEAN:*	Really? At what age was this?
*LAURIE:*	I was three. They used to follow me to nursery school. My house was tapped, my phone was tapped. They used to follow my mother to work every day. My father was in and out of jail most of the time. And then he was in jail for two years in Missouri, when I was nine or ten. But the essence of it was that it was challenging. I withdrew when I was very young. I became quite disturbed and used to throw up every day. I was very, very sensitive and always questioning. I didn't understand how a man who was fighting for a better world could be having the relationship that he had in his family since he wasn't there. We didn't have a better world in *our* house. And it was complicated by the fact that we also lived in a neighborhood where we were persecuted because we were Jews. I was told I was going to be crucified when I was little.
*DEAN:*	You had a heavy burden to bear.
*LAURIE:*	Yes, but the other side of it is that I had a consciousness -- a vision of a better world and of the truth of the pain in the world and the injustice in the world -- at a very young age. My father was very deep and, although I was never political in the traditional sense, I did have a heart connection with him and I did grow up with a very wide vision. And I'm very grateful for that.
*DEAN:*	Were there discussions at home about history and about making a better world?
*LAURIE:*	Yes, but I wasn't interested in it because it was so intellectual. My father was really pretty detached and pretty dogmatic when he was young. There were all kinds of politics.
*DEAN:*	Was he a Stalinist?
*LAURIE:*	I guess they would say he was, but I'm hesitant to put him in that category because he was a rebel himself. He wasn't a "personality," you know? He wasn't well known: he was a theoretician, and he was a teacher.
*DEAN:*	Did he publish anything?
*LAURIE:*	Some pamphlets I think. I know that he had trouble writing his autobiography later. People wanted him to.
*DEAN:*	He wrote parts of it but not the full story?
*LAURIE:*	He wrote notes, but he was never able to write about himself easily. He was very much a rebel. He saw everything in terms of a process. So although he didn't support Stalin, nor Czechoslovakia, he did support it in the sense that he saw it as a process. This is where he was similar to Paul. And I was born into that, so it was very natural for me in some ways to flow with that way of thinking.
*DEAN:*	Did you inherit a sense that you wanted to have a very significant life that would change the world to some degree?
*LAURIE:*	I always wanted to heal. From the time I was very little I wanted to help people. I was very aware of pain. In terms of being known, I don't think I really ever thought about that until recently. But significant in terms of making a difference, that's been very strong with me ever since I was a child.
*DEAN:*	At what point in your life did you meet Paul? How did that come about?
*LAURIE:*	I was 18.
*DEAN:*	So you had already gone through some difficult teenage years?
*LAURIE:*	Well, I had a breakdown. I was at City College and I was really phobic and overwhelmed with anxiety. And my parents sent me to a therapist who was also a leftist -- perhaps a communist. I was rebellious and knew that this guy wasn't for me. It was ridiculous and I knew it from the start.
*DEAN:*	I think I'm having trouble picturing a therapist/communist.
*LAURIE:*	Right. I only went to him twice before I had a fight with him. I knew he was going to tell me all my problems came from my father and I didn't believe that.
*DEAN:*	Was he going to translate it to economics somehow?
*LAURIE:*	No. I don't know how I knew this actually, but I was aware that he was going to see me more conventionally than I was. It didn't last. At that time I was working in an office with someone named Edna. She told me that she and her husband Mark were walking down the street in the Village and they came across a Village Counseling Service. They went in and there was this man who was a psychiatrist, but he was dressed like a regular person and he was great. She was going to him. And that's how I got to him.
*DEAN:*	What did you think of Paul?
*LAURIE:*	Oh, I loved him. The first thing he said to me was, "You're *feminine*, and you will either be an affective schizophrenic or lead a highly creative life." Then he said, "There's not much I can do for you, but I will teach you everything I know."
*DEAN:*	Wow.
*LAURIE:*	That was the first time I saw him. That was it.
*DEAN:*	You knew you had landed a big fish. Well, how did it proceed? Did you find that what he was trying to teach made sense?
*LAURIE:*	Well, yes. He was working out his own theory of human nature at that time. I was very phobic and really on the edge of being schizophrenic, but it still made sense.
*DEAN:*	This was around 1966?
*LAURIE:*	Yes. I saw him twice a week in the beginning. I was worried about whether I might have to go to a hospital, but he would always say, "If you need to go it will be for a rest." He made it very gentle and made me secure really. He treated me like his daughter. He really loved me, he accepted me. At first he only charged me five dollars, and then ten dollars. Sometimes I would go there after I'd bought a record or something and I wouldn't have the money, and he was fine with that. He would bake cookies and give them to me. He'd talk to me about his life and he would tell me that the only way you could ever help anybody is to be involved with them. You couldn't really say we talked about regular psychology.
*DEAN:*	At least not in an abstract schematic way.
*LAURIE:*	No, we talked about life in a real way. And that the only way you ever know anyone is through loving them. I mean the main thing that he taught me in that period was to trust my symptoms as tools. That really transformed my life. That was the key.
*DEAN:*	How does a symptom become a tool?
*LAURIE:*	Well, if you're anxious, then it's telling you something about what's going on within you and around you, you know? It brings consciousness.
*DEAN:*	Did he help you rethink where you were going in life?
*LAURIE:*	I didn't know where I was going in life. And I think that was one of the reasons why in some ways we had trouble. After he began to work exclusively with gay men (except me), he liked to introduce his patients to each other, but he didn't know who to introduce me to because I was a woman -- if I'd been a gay man it would have been different. He did influence me to being friends with Lee, a student of his who was running therapy groups based on Paul's theories, and to being in Lee's group. In the beginning, I saw Paul regularly, probably twice a week for awhile and then once a week. He was very strong about not seeing him too much because then I wouldn't have involvements and experience to learn from.
*DEAN:*	Was he telling you about homosexuality?
*LAURIE:*	No, but I met someone who was gay about a year after starting with Paul. His name was Colin and he was a museum curator. He was the first gay man I knew, and he lived next door from where I lived on 82nd Street and Columbus. And I loved him. I fell in love with him because he helped me so much. He helped me drop out of school. He was 27, I think. Paul supported that relationship tremendously, because we were really helping each other with our lives. He taught me that this is what it is to love another person.
*DEAN:*	This was a non-sexual love that you had for this man?
*LAURIE:*	Right. That was my introduction to homosexuality. *Then* Paul started talking to me about it, and it never was a problem. I never before had considered it. I'd never even thought about going to a psychologist. I didn't come from that way of thinking. Colin had gone to Harvard and had had a breakdown, and he understood what I was going through. I mean I was totally flipping out in school. I was just overwhelmed with anxiety. He said, "Why don't you drop out?" And it never occurred to me. Paul also was saying that to me. It was all working together.
*DEAN:*	I guess at this point you had ceased trying to get advice from your mother?
*LAURIE:*	Oh, I'd ceased that a long time before.
*DEAN:*	You didn't get along with her?
*LAURIE:*	Not then I didn't, no.
*DEAN:*	Was she as creative as your father was?
*LAURIE:*	You know, I have to take another perspective because it was such a healing to be with them through their deaths. My mother's life was lived for my father.
*DEAN:*	I've seen that in a lot of masculine women who attach themselves to feminine men who have a large sense of their own identity. It's a big problem.
*LAURIE:*	But she was much freer, internally, than she had access to in her life. She was very celebrative. So I fought with her a lot. She was much more rigid. I mean they both were rigid. I left my parents when I was 16. And then I went back and then Paul supported me leaving again. I think I must have been 17 or 18. I'm unclear about these years.
*DEAN:*	I'm mostly interested in how Paul helped you.
*LAURIE:*	He was very against my being involved with them, on that level.
*DEAN:*	Did you start reading his books or was that not necessary?
*LAURIE:*	I wasn't as good a student as I think he might have expected me to be in some ways. I've never been. I don't read except for information. But I did read his first book then.
*DEAN:*	*Psychoanalysis and Civilization*?
*LAURIE:*	Yes.
*DEAN:*	There's a lot of poetry in that book.
*LAURIE:*	And I think I read the second one. Now I've read all of them, but then I hadn't. And he would test me sometimes. And I sometimes wouldn't know the answer and he would get angry. He wouldn't get *angry* angry, but he wasn't happy about it.
*DEAN:*	He didn't want to have to do all the teaching. He wanted you to do some homework.
*LAURIE:*	Right. And he would talk to me about the theory. I remember one day when he realized that eating was a form of celebration, and he was really excited about it. You know, he was still working it out. He would talk to me about it and I would talk to him about things, too. I remember telling him once that the reason I was attracted to the people I was attracted to who cut me off was because we were both polarized in our need to develop our independence so that we would come together to grow. And I remember him saying, "Yeah, right." You know, we would work together sometimes. It was great.
*DEAN:*	Did he talk to you about his relationship with Allan, his lover at that time?
*LAURIE:*	Yes, he talked to me about everything. Paul would tell me what he thought, how he acted. Once when he was with you he told me that he said to you when you were being defiant, "Why don't you just go run naked in the streets?" And he said he had been very cold and was somewhat regretful. He would talk to me as a friend.
*DEAN:*	He had a tremendous respect for you. I think it was as recently as five years ago that he surprised me when I asked who of all his patients and students and friends had understood his work the best. He thought for a moment and then said, "I think probably Laurie." And this was long after you had ceased being actively involved with him on a daily basis. We didn't even know where you were or what had become of you.
*LAURIE:*	I did understand his work. I mean we were very similar internally. And he used our similarity to guide me. Before then I really didn't have a role model. I really was without "a way."
*DEAN:*	I remember what it's like to be a messed-up teenager, not know what the hell you're going to do with your life.
*LAURIE:*	Right, but I was very pure in my lack of knowing. I didn't have any . . .
*DEAN:*	Pretensions?
*LAURIE:*	I don't want to use that word because it's judgmental. Trappings, I guess. I mean I didn't come from a conventional . . .
*DEAN:*	Facade, maybe?
*LAURIE:*	Right, I didn't have any facade. I was just there and in need. I was very receptive to what he was saying and I thought about it constantly. I lived that theory for many years. I tested it, I understood it, I observed it in people. I really studied it very deeply.
*DEAN:*	You also tried to get involved with his other students, and I guess we'll have to see that in some way as a disappointment. They weren't made out of the same cloth that he was.
*LAURIE:*	That's been one of the major lessons in my life. I wouldn't call it a disappointment, no. I would say that it really was a learning process. I really couldn't say that it was a disappointment. It taught me that I was a teacher.
*DEAN:*	A couple of years ago I took another look at a videotape that was made at that time of one of Lee's therapy groups. And this one scene where you're being persecuted by Lee for something petty was pretty disgusting.
*LAURIE:*	Well, I tell you, it gave me an opportunity to be in the world and to develop defenses that I had to learn from. Lee really did come from a pure place. He was a very hurt, angry man, a very, very alone man with a lot of rage and a lot of pain and disappointment. I was grateful for his caring for me. I loved him.
*DEAN:*	It was clear through all of the hostility that he was very interested in you.
*LAURIE:*	We were very close.
*DEAN:*	I'm not quite sure where to take this now. Let's take a deep breath.
*LAURIE:*	I want to say this about Paul. Later, things became more complicated because he began to grow and enter a bigger world based on his own truth. But in my early time with him, he really taught me that love was what was healing. And that is where I come from and what I'm teaching now. He saved my life and really taught me what healing is and what it is to be a healer, and gave me the foundation for my being a healer.
*DEAN:*	I remember him telling Mark that the only times in his life when he really felt depressed was when he had nothing to love. He always needed something to love, even if it was a child or a sick person or cats in the backyard. When we first started living together, he told me that when he got old, if I wasn't able to keep him, it would be okay to put him in the hospital. As long as he could feel for the man in the next bed and just have some kind of compassion in his heart, then he would be alright. That's the central need for a feminine person, I guess.
*LAURIE:*	That's the central need for every person. The difference I think with Paul and the world that he lived in is that the world was bound more by roles at the time. There's more chaos in the world now. I went to a concert for Martin Luther King last Saturday night. I haven't been to anything with such a political consciousness since probably 1964. I withdrew from political demonstrations of any type when I was about 18. I was arrested twice and I realized it was not my way. I was too frightened. So anyway, this concert Saturday was a good concert, but I really saw there how the energy of the Civil Rights movement in the sixties was very focused and very excited and proud. And I can really feel the difference in the time we're living in now, where the work that's demanded of people is much more *inner*. It's a much more complex time. The lines aren't as defined. A lot of people are leaving, a lot of people are dying. There's a battle going on, there's a war going on much more internally. Do you understand what I mean by that?
*DEAN:*	I think I do. We're living in a more psychological age. People used to refer jokingly to the 70's as the Me Generation, but the change is much deeper and more permanent than anything that is easily joked about.
*LAURIE:*	The reason I'm working with people with AIDS is that I believe that AIDS is a teaching. And it's teaching people to take care of themselves, to love themselves. It's teaching about fear, and it's teaching about love. It's teaching about the oneness of us all. It's a different time. So I don't feel the fear that I used to feel when I was in my twenties, or the emptiness that I used to feel. And I think part of that is developmental because I've grown and I know myself better. I have a very loving relationship with myself at this point. But it's also because there is such a demand around me -- at least in the world that I'm choosing to live in -- for healing.
*DEAN:*	You radiate something I would hesitate even to name because it has to be seen to be believed. I see it even in the video tapes that were made of you 15 years ago -- even the one where you're baking gingerbread cookies.
*LAURIE:*	Oh my God!
*DEAN:*	It's real cute. Well, I sense that you are a healer and that you are going to attract people to you because you have a quality very similar to Paul's. Paul always used to say how he could get some new person "eating out of his hand in five minutes." Almost as if the world was full of wild hurt animals who needed to be tamed and calmed and just comforted a little. And you certainly have that quality.
*LAURIE:*	Thank you.
*DEAN:*	Maybe we could ask how you use Paul's ideas or his theory today. Obviously when you look for a lover, you're looking for somebody who's polarized with you?
*LAURIE:*	At this point in my life the theory is so integrated in me that I don't look for that. I will just have that.
*DEAN:*	That's interesting. I guess I'm like that too. And I also would have a hard time answering that question.
*LAURIE:*	I only talk about the theory with people who could use it as an intellectual tool without disconnecting to do that, if you understand what I mean.
*DEAN:*	Without making it a cerebral exercise?
*LAURIE:*	Exactly. I don't generally talk about it. I'm really finding my own way of communicating.
*DEAN:*	And yet I'm sure you influence masculine people in a masculine direction and feminine people in a feminine direction.
*LAURIE:*	Right, but I'd like to think that I would do that anyway.
*DEAN:*	Oh, I see.
*LAURIE:*	This just gives me the light.
*DEAN:*	Well, you know, I'm sure that a number of therapists would do this instinctively.
*LAURIE:*	Right. I mean there are people I've told the theory to who have said, "I know that."
*DEAN:*	Once Paul told me he had a theatrical director or something in for an initial interview, and Paul had launched into a fifteen minute lecture on polarity theory. And the man nodded his head and said, "Oh, I figured that stuff out twenty years ago."
*LAURIE:*	That's what I'm saying. I mean it's the truth. The truth is the truth.
*DEAN:*	It's not Paul's theory at that point. It's just how the world works.
*LAURIE:*	Paul's brilliance is that he shed light on the truth. But the truth exists. My work at this point is with people who are on the edge and with people who are dying. I work within a bigger space than to talk intellectually with people. I really am making heart connections with people. Now, that's in my work and that's my basic way of working, but that doesn't mean that I won't explain to someone who is having a problem with a lover why they may be having that problem. And in that moment, I will use the theory. I will talk about masculine energies and feminine energies. I don't talk specifically about the theory. On the other hand, my last lover, Jon, really took to the theory. He's reading over all the monographs and understanding it on a much deeper level. Since we separated he has developed a much more profound understanding of it, seeing how you have to live it to understand it. For Jon, who can really work with intellectual concepts brilliantly, the theory is very important.
*DEAN:*	He might become a very useful soldier in what Paul called the creative army of civilization.
*LAURIE:*	He is, more than I am, on that level.
*DEAN:*	Well, what do you think makes a man like Paul? Did you ever get a feeling for what his early life must have been like or what he had gone through?
*LAURIE:*	I think of his sensitivity, I think of his capacity for love, I think of the brilliant capacity of his mind to understand, and of his patience. He was much more conventionally -- and I mean this in a good way -- *scientific* than I am. Hence his ability to work with concepts in a very patient way, to put them together, to come up with a truth that's so clear about why people operate the way they do. And now I'm talking about his identity. You were asking I think also about his surroundings, right?
*DEAN:*	But the identity is the basic thing, I think.
*LAURIE:*	I believe that we attract the surroundings we need to attract based on our identity, so I can't really say it's the surroundings that did it.
*DEAN:*	I agree. It turns out not to be a very fruitful question when I ask people that. It's one of those unanswerable things.
*LAURIE:*	Right. I guess any answer is guaranteed to be too limited.
*DEAN:*	Maybe a more useful question would be this. It would be wrong for us to let the essence of Paul vanish with his corporeal person. It would be wrong for us to let what Paul had brought into the world vanish with his death. We know the books will survive: they're in libraries, and when people are ready to read them they'll be read. But what about this first generation of his students -- his children, really -- what do we have to feel in our hearts to live up to what he stood for?
*LAURIE:*	By being as true to ourselves as we can be. And having as much integrity and honesty as we can at any given moment. Having the intention of serving ourselves and the people around us with our greatest openness. You know, sometimes we do that by saying we need help. And having as much compassion and as open a heart as we can to the pain in the world around us. I mean that's it for me. Does that answer your question?
*DEAN:*	I think it does.
*LAURIE:*	I don't think there's any one way for any person. I think all of us have our own paths and our own lives. Sometimes someone has to be alcoholic and to learn from that, and that may be good. I mean, I see AIDS as a path. For all the people that I've worked with, AIDS leads to the heart.
*DEAN:*	I've seen that. I've seen people just get very much more centered. They get to face the very most important and ever-present facts of existence.
*LAURIE:*	Absolutely. I took care of a man who died in April who I'd worked with for a year. In the last four months, I was his primary care person. The healing that took place in his life and in my life was very beautiful, despite all the anger and the fear and the difficulties at times. He died on Easter and the last thing he did before he died was applaud. He died at peace. And I'd like to think that was partly due to the work that we did, that he did on himself and that we did together. That's what I've seen. I don't always see it in that form, but I'm working with a woman now who was a drug addict. I've never worked with a woman who had AIDS or was a drug addict. Last Friday she was telling me that she was afraid of dying and what happens on the other side. I don't come from a religious background at all, but with my father and with my mother, I became open to the idea that this isn't all there is. There's much more going on here than we know. I believe that there is body, mind, *and* spirit. I've read about near death experiences, and I've gone to the Elizabeth Kubler Ross workshop, and I've read Stephen Levine -- he really is one of my new teachers. I believe that we are born to heal ourselves and to learn. That's what life is about, whether you believe there's an afterlife or not. That obviously seems to be what we're here for. When you finish learning what you have come for, you leave your body. And I believe that we are energy and that this energy continues. I don't know what form it takes but I believe the learning goes on. Anyway, this woman, who comes from a whole other way of living than you or I do, turned to me and said, "Well I'll tell you something. I'm growing *now*. I'm growing for myself and I'm growing more than I ever did before. I'm not doing it with anybody else but I am growing." And I was just floored since I'd never talked to her about growing. So there's something going on here that's more than we know.
*DEAN:*	I guess that the most interesting kind of human phenomena are found in the tragedies and revolutions of consciousness, no matter what their cause, when people really start questioning and digging and changing their minds -- and realize that they *can* change their minds. That's when people not only start growing but when you can reach and help people.
*LAURIE:*	Right. I see it with people who are approaching death. Something happens.
*DEAN:*	They want to come clean. They want to stop playing the games.
*LAURIE:*	I don't think they want to. I think it's just part of the developmental process. Dying is a process like giving birth is. Elizabeth Kubler Ross says that as the physical body drops, lets go, the spiritual quadrant opens up. She has a whole theory about that.
*DEAN:*	I didn't know she believed that. I've seen the documentary on TV about her, and it was just wonderful work.
*LAURIE:*	She's very spiritual at this point. Yet she's very grounded. I mean she smokes and she doesn't believe you have to meditate or eat special food or anything like that.
*DEAN:*	That's what I liked about her: she was so down to earth.
*LAURIE:*	She also has worked with people for years, and one of the things that has happened in her own life -- and the same thing has happened in mine -- is that she just began to see that there is a whole spiritual side to us, and that this is not just trippie stuff but is very real. It's an opening of the heart really. And I saw it with my father. As he became closer to his own death, he began to communicate from a deeper, more sensitive space, from his heart.
*DEAN:*	Do you think Paul's teachings are for a small group of people, or do you think slowly his ideas and perhaps even his name will become commonplace in the world?
*LAURIE:*	I don't know because, well, traditional psychology is very limited. You understand what I'm saying? His depth of understanding transcends that. The bigness of his ideas are not only about the theory. They're about and they reflect who he was as a person.
*DEAN:*	And how he approached the purposes of his life.
*LAURIE:*	And what life is about. That life is about growing, is about being creative and being happy and loving, and helping each other reach that. That sounds very simple, and I don't mean to negate or deny the brilliance of the theory in any way when I say that.
*DEAN:*	I guess what you're saying is that science may be only a stage in a larger process of understanding the world that mankind has to go through, and that at some point our understanding will be even fuller and broader than any narrow definition of science might encompass.
*LAURIE:*	And it's beginning to happen already. I've been reading a book called *Space, Time and Medicine* which shows how the new physics -- quantum physics -- shifts all the concepts in healing, where you're no longer talking about particles and everything being separate. You're now talking about unity and oneness, and that sickness may be a positive step in one's evolution and one's healing.
*DEAN:*	This whole business about "non-locality" is very troubling to the physics guys, but their best tests all come to the same conclusion: that either logic itself has to break down or else the universe is not just a bunch of separate little particles that can't communicate faster than the speed of light. It's in some sense connected in a holistic way, and they don't understand it.
*LAURIE:*	Exactly. This book is very scientific -- it's about physics and the different theories that have emerged about synchronicity and different things to really prove this to someone who wouldn't believe that it's true. It's pretty technical. Yes, that is what I'm saying. I want to be careful in saying it because I love Paul and I value him and he was so important. He was my first teacher. And he and all of my teachers since then have been on that same path of seeing life holistically as a developmental process -- it's about evolution and about love.
*DEAN:*	Will what Paul taught always be true? Will any future teaching have to include as a subset what Paul taught? Or do you think a lot of what Paul taught will be thought irrelevant or too technical?
*LAURIE:*	Psychology is very much in the moment of the time we're living in. So what is true today in four million years may not be true. Paul's theory that men and women are both masculine and feminine was not true of cave men: women were feminine and men were masculine. So I can't predict how that's going to go.
*DEAN:*	It brings up the whole question of to what degree does knowledge allow people to change their own natures -- how does new truth enable more right to exist and vice versa. If same-gender polarity is just a useful adaptation, there may evolve secondary and tertiary polarities. Two masculine guys may develop some new kind of polarity that we can't envision.
*LAURIE:*	Absolutely. I have a friend, a very close friend, who's gay and masculine. Right now he is growing from having relationships with masculine men. Now, they're not the traditional concept of lovers but he is becoming much freer with men who are masculine who are different from him, who are learning from him and who he's learning from. I see this as a stage in his process, but it's just as valid as being with someone who's feminine. I can every once in awhile try and get him to be with someone feminine, you know, but it's not where he belongs right now.
*DEAN:*	Here's another example of that. It concerns someone you used to know from the Center. He always used to memorize all of Paul's formulations and use them as weapons against people to prove how smart he was and how stupid they were. And we had a discussion group around five years ago where I was trying to advocate that, even though non-polarized friendships are difficult, in certain ways you can learn more from them because they can be more challenging or just challenging in a new way. And he immediately came up with a formula. "Well," he said, "anytime you have a non-polarized relationship, it's just buddies, you know? Nothing's going to happen. You're going to go bowling and drink beer." Since I knew how much Paul had helped him change his life, I said, "The most important person that's ever been in your life -- who has taught you more than anybody else -- is another feminine. And you don't even realize that." He didn't seem to get it.
*LAURIE:*	We were all different when we were younger. Kids can be pretty cruel.
*DEAN:*	He died last year of a cancer unrelated to AIDS.
*LAURIE:*	He did? How old was he?
*DEAN:*	In his sixties, I think. He got a lot of support from people at the Center who liked him and got along with him. I think he was in good shape. I saw him for the last time a month before he died. He looked like a Buddhist monk with sunken cheeks and no hair on his head. He looked absolutely hollow physically, but very content in some way. He looked like he was getting ready to go on some trip. He didn't know where he was going, but he was ready.
*LAURIE:*	Wonderful, wonderful. I'm really glad to hear that.
*DEAN:*	We hugged each other. It was a very good parting. I knew I'd never see him again and he knew it also. We left on a positive note.
*LAURIE:*	That's healing.
*DEAN:*	I wanted it to be like that. Well, you know, my last years with Paul were like that too. I had moved out and I wasn't trying to have a deep three-dimensional confrontation with him every day like we used to. I was trying to heal him -- and myself -- from the overstimulation of what we'd been through. We had driven each other crazy for years. And people who have a history like that I think really need to just affirm that they also just like one another and want to be just family in some way. And we had many, many good moments of feeling like a family. And that made a big difference for me because when he finally left, I felt as if I had done my best. I'd given him everything I could. If there was anything that I didn't give him it was because I didn't have it then to give, and maybe someday I'll have it for someone else.
*LAURIE:*	Or maybe it wasn't meant to be.
*DEAN:*	Well, we knew from the start that our lives were going to overlap. He used to say that he'd spent the first forty years of his life getting ready for me and that after he was gone he would live on through me, that my life would be a continuation in some real sense of his life.
*LAURIE:*	That doesn't have to be in any one form either.
*DEAN:*	No, and it can't be academic. It can't just be my writing complicated books about complicated theories that nobody ever reads. That wouldn't be commensurate with his stature or mine.
*LAURIE:*	No. I hope I haven't been too simple in my description of his achievements.
*DEAN:*	I don't think so. I think the basic truth about this man is something so simple that a lot of us forget it.
*LAURIE:*	I think that's true. In trying to understand it, you forget it.
*DEAN:*	We're so used to using our cerebral cortex to understand things like calculus or computers that we forget that the most important things are right in front of us, or in our own hearts. We don't look at them, and we don't know how to think about them. And I think we have to get simpler to get back to that.
*LAURIE:*	That's exactly what I'm saying.
*DEAN:*	I might like to look up Stephen Levine. Is he a doctor?
*LAURIE:*	No, he works with death and dying as an opportunity to awaken. I've read his books. He's part of the new dying movement, really.
*DEAN:*	Oh, is there a dying movement?
*LAURIE:*	There's a death and dying movement that's just beginning. You know, hospices and stuff. And he's quite spiritual. He began as a poet and a meditation teacher. Then he worked with Elizabeth Kubler Ross.
*DEAN:*	I can look him up at Barnes and Noble or Strands. I spend a lot of time just roaming bookstores. It's my idea of an adventure. Some people go to Africa and hunt lions, but I go to a bookstore and get lost in the ideas.
*LAURIE:*	But if you don't resonate with Stephen, don't force yourself.
*DEAN:*	I'm interested in this subject partly because I believe it's like the last taboo in a way. What I went through with Paul was very natural, very wholesome -- if that doesn't sound too cheerful.
*LAURIE:*	No, it sounds absolutely true. I know exactly what you mean.
*DEAN:*	And I really don't think it's right that people are denied the opportunity to experience something that is so central: how we come out of existence.
*LAURIE:*	Exactly, that's exactly how I see it. That's why I do this work.
*DEAN:*	People think that there's something wrong with dying, almost as if the person is at fault. To me, this is one of the social oppressions about dying.
*LAURIE:*	Check out *Who Dies*. If you like it, let me know. I was going to tell you what I wanted to do. I want to, in time, create a community of healers and artists, and have a hospice within this community where these ideas that I'm talking about and my own truth -- the idea that life is a process of learning and of healing, and that sickness and death is part of that process -- is the main way of living, of thinking in this community. So that people can be there who are dying and who are sick and not be isolated but be a part of the bigger process. That's my goal.
*DEAN:*	That's a big goal. I think you mentioned something about that to me a few years ago.
*LAURIE:*	It's getting clearer though. And I'm meeting doctors. I need a doctor who's open-minded, and that's not too easy to find. But that's where I'm going.