Thank you, Rev. Bob for a fine presentation celebrating Elaine and her world.

     Thank you, all who are here today to Celebrate Elaine, those that visited me and my family at my home this weekend, and those who sent condolences by letter or e-mail from throughout the world, now well over 1000.

     For all the support and love, I thank my extended family, Bob and Heather, Elaine’s children and my children, Sarah and Eric, by my first wife Audrey, a wonderful Vermont lady, who was a victim of my career as Chief of Pathology at EMMC at the tender age of 33. (As a Jungian introvert, I am not a coach or a leader, but fortunately had super fellow associate pathologists and great lab personnel). Also thanx to their mates, Mike Smith, Stacy Thompson, Emily Thompson, Charles Salem, Elise Salaun-Dahl and ten super grand children, Allison Thompson,  Colleen Thompson, Lizzy Smith, Gabby Smith, Isaac Salem, Olivia Salem, Emma Salem, Chloe Salaun-Dahl, Loic Salaun-Dahl, and Laura Salaun-Dahl. Elaine and I are blessed.

     Special thanx for joining us this weekend go to my sister Carole Weidemiller (my only living sibling, enjoying our status as the family “black sheep” who survived and succeeded) along with her husband Don from Florida. Also thank you for joining us, John James Young, son of my other sister, Betty Ann, along with his wife Diana and their daughters, Chloe and Georgia.

     Thank you, Jan Halloran, the Prayer Flag lady here today and Caroline and Donna who spent time with me at Seadog and other places, asking and answering those powerful questions about Elaine, those Socratic questions that accompany the grieving process.

     Also, thank you, Pat Shaw for Elaine’s Celebration web site and the printouts on the windows,  to Michael York for taking photos, to David Fitzpatrick who helped Elaine and me with our Optimize Your Life! book series and web sites, the cover art for What Better Place to Die, and to Pat Shaw for the book layout.

     Elaine not only helped write What Better Place to Die, she created the title, and lived the messages, the admonitions in the book: Be prepared to die, Have a plan to live, Do it now!  

     Thank you, Brad Coffey of Eastern Maine Healthcare Charities and my attorney Nathan Dane III for working with me as we crafted the donation for the Elaine Pearson Dahl Atrium at the new CancerCare of Maine facility in Brewer. It was great to have Deborah Johnson, RN EMMC President and CEO and Thomas Openshaw, M.D. Chief Oncologist at CCofM to join us today as we celebrate that memorial.   

    In closing, what about Elaine and me? How do I “make sense” out of 31 years together, as soul mates. At one of the talk-it-out sessions with Jan, the Prayer Flag lady (who lost her husband one year and 10 days ago!) she asked:

                      “How do best remember Elaine, in a word of two?”

    After a series of left-brain linear logic statements, she asked:

                      “How do you now feel about Elaine?”

     I harked back to all those philosophers, theologians, and other wizards, I have studied these past fourteen years, since my “early retirement”, and focused on the five senses: to see, to hear, to taste, to smell, to touch, and came up with three words:

                        She touched me…

in real terms and metaphorically. She touched my body, my mind, and my soul, as we traveled and learned (like Tantric skills gained in Nepal), as we grew older and wiser, as we struggled with illnesses. She also touched many others throughout Maine, USA, and the world, as we traveled to over 50 different countries.

     So, in closing, thank you, all for Celebrating Elaine.

To Elaine: For years we shared my favorite quotation about us:

                    “I love you not only for what you are,

                    but what you make me when I am with you”.

                  Those words still ring through, as they will forever.

                                           *******

                   You touched me and I was never the same!