Word came in the form of an email this afternoon that my dear friend Craigen Bowen had passed from our plane late last night. This was not unexpected. CB had been having a nasty disagreement with lung cancer for the last year. But I've learned that sometimes even when you can anticipate a major loss, it doesn't seem to make the loss any easier to take once it finally happens.
Craigen and I got to know one another years ago when I was a computer tech at the Fogg Art Museum and she was the head of the Paper Conservation Lab at the Museum. CB wasn't your typical academic type. First of all, she didn't brook much in the way of BS. She was a small woman with a straightforward, powerful personality but, at the same time, she wasn't a prima donna. We immediately found that we got along fine. I left the museum after a year to go on to another job at Harvard, but we'd run into one another on campus on occasion and these chance meetings were always a good thing. We were friends, but didn't really know each other all that well.
The Museum grapevine is thick even for we alumni and I heard a year ago that she had been diagnosed with a very bad form of cancer and was undergoing chemotherapy. In the years since the Museum, I had picked up a couple of energy healing tricks and I contacted her offering to give Reiki and Ki treatments if she thought that they would be useful. So last March, she and I started seeing each other once or more times a week for treatments and I started to learn a lot more about Craigen Bowen.
First, I learned that, though she grew up in New Jersey, she was more of a Yankee than even I was. She was opinionated, stubborn, but willing to listen to anyone who could hold their own in an argument with her. I learned how much she loved her children and nieces and nephews, and how much she thought of other people (I was always asked if I needed something to drink or eat when I came to her house, no matter how sick she was). I learned that she thought of the people that worked in her lab as "her people," and that she agonized about management decisions that she had to make that affected them. I learned how much she loved the art that she worked on every day and how deep her knowledge about that art was. I learned that her cathedrals were mountains and that she was deliriously happy when she was climbing them.
In short, I learned that Craigen was every bit the complex, multi-faceted human that I always thought that she was. She was a person with an amazing amount of depth and a natural resource in human form. Most of all, I learned that we who had the privilege of getting to know her are going to miss her for a very, very long time.
CB, wherever you are, I hope that the pitches on the rock are just hard enough, that the conversations with Albrecht Durer go well, and that the sunsets on the peaks as spectacular was the memories of you that you've left behind for all of us. Thank you for being among us and fare well.
Nicely said. I'm the one who's been sending out the emails. News or your post came to me thru several email forwards. Very nice. She will be greatly missed.
Posted by: Alicia | March 10, 2008 at 06:41 PM