Eleanor came into my life at just the right time. It was early 2013 and my mother had died three months earlier after a grinding, multi-year onslaught of colon cancer.
I was grieving. I’d been tethered to my mother, for better or worse, for 45 years. When she died, I felt unmoored. Her death also made me realize I’d been neglecting the creative work I felt I was meant to do.
Eleanor was kind, encouraging, and warm. Despite our twenty-five year age difference she was less a mother figure to me than simply a friend.
Just over a year ago, around Labor Day weekend 2022, Eleanor was diagnosed with Stage 4 pancreatic cancer. By Halloween she was gone. I still miss her a lot.
Eleanor was a Kindness Warrior. Here are three things I learned from her.
Open up your circles
Before we became friends, we were acquaintances through the Buddhist meditation center we both attended. One day I mentioned to a mutual acquaintance there my desire to start writing again and he said, “You know Eleanor is a writer, don’t you?”
I didn’t.
I reached out to her by phone and she suggested we meet for lunch. My grief was still an overflowing well that spilled out on the unsuspecting whenever I started talking about my mom, but Eleanor listened with attention and caring presence as I unleashed both grief and creative frustration.
I don’t remember what she said, but her smile, her subtle wit, and her kindness were a balm for my soul. When we parted she gave me a copy of her book of short stories, Tea and other Ayama Na Tales, and she encouraged me to keep in touch and trust my instincts as I looked for ways to stretch my creative muscles and find community.
Within a year her longstanding read and critique group was looking for new members and she invited me to join. I was so nervous at my first meeting my voice shook and sweat dampened my armpits as I read a personal essay I’d been working on.
Almost ten years later, I’m still in the group. My writing group members have become friends, trusted critique partners, cheerleaders, commiserators, and fellow travelers on the writing journey.
I’ve tested a lot of writing there, including most of the first drafts of what became my five storytelling performances to date with So Say We All (including one for the “Let’s Dance” theme, below, that grew out of that first essay I read for the group).
Eleanor, in her seventies, attended as many of these as she could, getting a ride since she didn’t drive at night, to sit in a loud, dark bar on a flimsy plastic chair just to see my show. That meant the world to me.
Her invitation changed my life.
It’s easy to stick to our same little circles, especially as we get older. Eleanor didn’t do that. She was constantly making new friends and widening her circles to let others in.
Love things that are flawed
Eleanor wrote deliciously flawed characters. Whether it was a factory worker so obsessed with the robot dogs flowing off his assembly line he ignores his wife and child, or a sad college student covering the grief of her younger sister’s long-ago disappearance with a layer of snark, or a crusty old lady in a nursing home still trying to one-up her only living sibling, her characters vibrate with human foibles and follies. But through all their flaws flows the love of their creator.
I always enjoyed reading Eleanor’s drafts because her characters were so relatable. Courage mixed with cowardice, avarice mixed with selflessness, and bravado mixed with vulnerability were the hallmarks of her fictional creations. And she so obviously loved them all.
Sadly, I don’t know of any recordings of Eleanor reading her work, but below is a storyteller’s performance of Eleanor’s short story “Not-Henry,” which won Honorable Mention in the San Diego Public Library’s 2019 Short Story Contest.
This ability to love things that are flawed was severely tested when our global Shambhala meditation community was dragged kicking and screaming into a painful reckoning with allegations of abuse of power and serious sexual misconduct by senior leaders going back decades.
I remember Eleanor and I sitting at lunch again one afternoon months after the initial fallout, wondering to each other, What now? She voiced what I was thinking — how can we reconcile our love for the teachings with the harm committed by teachers? And how to wrestle with the hierarchical systems that perpetuated that harm?
Many left. Others threw their energy into efforts to remake the global organization into something new. Others felt the only option was to let the whole organization fall apart. Eleanor and I ended up somewhere in the middle — recognizing our community was made of flawed individuals trying to figure things out as we went, worthy of love, but still needing to be held accountable.
This isn’t to say leaving or trying to make things better or letting things fall apart aren’t sometimes necessary. But there is also value in the messy middle.
Lean into kindness first
When giving feedback in our writers group, Eleanor was always sure to spend just as much time — or more — letting you know what she liked about a piece as what might need fixing. And given how vulnerable it feels to share unfinished work, I always appreciated this when it was my turn to get feedback.
I admit I don’t always follow her example. Sometimes I think, Well, they know what’s working. What they need to know is what needs fixing. (Here’s where my Enneagram 1 tendencies come in — IYKYK.) But I remember how it felt when she’d point out something she liked in my writing, saying “This is just terrific,” in her distinctive slightly raspy voice with its smidge of Massachusetts accent though she’d lived in California for years. And I try to remember to take the time to be kind first, before being “right,” or “helpful.”
Eleanor’s kindness was expansive.
In her retirement, she volunteered as a Court Appointed Special Advocate. These CASA volunteers work one-on-one with foster youth to advocate for their best interests. They provide a stable relationship that stays with the child or young person no matter what else in their life may change. (This short video about how a CASA volunteer can change a kid’s life is guaranteed to make you cry.)
Since most of these young people had experienced trauma, it sometimes took time for them to be able to trust another adult, but Eleanor was patient and persistent, loving them through it all.
To me, her CASA work epitomized all of her Kindness Warrior qualities together. She reached out with kindness to foster youth to bring them into her circle, accepting them regardless of their life circumstances and flaws.
I can only aspire to live up to her example in my own way.
What I’m reading
The Humble Life of Abner Rush is Eleanor’s last book, populated by her wonderfully flawed and human characters. Abner Rush is a 26-year-old PhD candidate from a well-off La Jolla family who believes he needs to leave academia and the world of the mind to live a meaningful life.
He starts a vinyl repair business and decides he will help society by hiring people who would otherwise be unemployable, giving them dignity in work and working alongside them.
But his holier-than-thou attitude trips him up time and again when confronted by the reality of the people he thinks he is helping, including Jody, the former foster youth he ends up marrying. Eventually, disillusioned, confused, and too proud to accept help from the people who love him, he stumbles into a life of deceit and lies until he hits bottom, where a surprising confrontation wakes him up to what he had all along.
This book almost didn’t make it into the world. Eleanor had been shopping it to agents for several years, but the publishing road can be a slog and she was more interested in writing her next story than crafting yet another query letter.
When it became clear that treatment was not an option for her cancer, our writers group asked if she would like help self-publishing this book she had worked so hard on. She agreed, and several dedicated folks were able to help her get it formatted and uploaded as a print-on-demand paperback.
She picked out the cover art herself, and wrote the Acknowledgments page just a week or so before she passed, including this passage:
“While Abner Rush narrates this book from start to finish, Jody, the foster youth he marries, is the beating heart of the novel, her transformation profound. Her character is not based on any of the children I advocated for, but I have poured into her my deep admiration, love, and respect for my “CASA kids.” — Eleanor Bluestein
I’m so glad I can share this book with you so the words of this truly remarkable woman can spread ripples of kindness into ever-widening circles.
So there you have it, my friends! Do you have a Kindness Warrior in your life? What does their example mean to you? I’d love to hear about it. Reply to this email or leave a comment below. All respectful discussion is welcome.
Thanks for sharing, Eleanor. What a beautiful tribute.
I feel fortunate to have a number of kindness warriors in my orbit. One that comes to mind is actually a couple--Debbie and Al (who’ve lived together nomadically on a boat and now an RV for well over two decades!!). I met them during my first year living in a van at a moment when my fridge had stopped functioning in the middle of nowhere and I was planning to attempt to splice a cord to fix it. Gulp. They offered tools and cheerleading and, later, a sunset cocktail. And this has led to a beautiful friendship (that has included their help in a couple of other projects down the road)!
Louise
I love what you read about Eleanor. She was kindness personified. I too was inspired by how she always pointed out the positive in people’s writing. Her behavior was role model and she inspires me to strive to be a better person.