Rae Edelson

Rae Edelson was a frank and unconventional person. She did not use euphemisms. She spoke and wrote directly. This obituary will be in that spirit.
Rae was born in Newark, New Jersey on February 9, 1943. Her mother was Fannie Temkin (Winokur) and her father was Kalman Temkin, a Russian Jewish immigrant. Rae grew up in Hartford, Connecticut, living downstairs from her grandparents, Charles Winokur and Mary Winokur (Petrushka), who were Polish Jews and immigrants. Rae loved her grandparents, who had owned a farm in Vernon, Connecticut and regularly read a political newspaper written in Yiddish. Rae's mother, Fannie, had three siblings-Meyer, Joe, and Celia. Fannie worked as a secretary for an insurance company in Hartford. Rae's father was a painting contractor who spoke at least four languages, loved history and politics, and wrote a book about Alexander the Great. Rae's father, Kalman, was older than her mother and she remembers him seeming generationally closer to her grandparents. Kalman would often speak about politics with Rae's grandparents. Rae's parents divorced when she was about 11, and her father ultimately moved to Israel.
Rae (known as "Rae Ellen" at the time) was an excellent ice skater and learned to do jumps on a pond near where she lived. She also sang and played the piano; it was important to her mother that she receive artistic training. As a child of about 8 or 9, she played a game called "movie star" with a boy in the neighborhood-the game produced her first kiss. She also had a dog named Smoky who she loved. Rae lived in a tough neighborhood in Hartford-she recalls sometimes running to school in order to get past edgy situations. As a teenager, Rae was a camp counselor, where she taught swimming and was a lifeguard. Campers called her "Rae-gun" (it was the late 1950s). Rae went to Weaver High School, where she was an excellent student. However, the school did not always prepare students for college, and she was not in good shape to take the math portion of the SAT. One of her uncles, a scientist, worked with her and she did very well on the test. She was accepted to Barnard at a time when women did not attend Columbia, Barnard's male counterpart. Rae loved Manhattan and majored in physics at Barnard. She felt different from her classmates, many of whom came from wealthy backgrounds. Rae remembered some of them would absently rap their diamond engagement rings against desks during classes.
When she was still in college, Rae's boyfriend presented her with an ultimatum: "marry me or leave me". Feeling pressure, Rae reluctantly agreed. She was just 20, and her boyfriend was 19. Rae crossed her fingers behind her back during the wedding vows so that "it wouldn't count".
Rae graduated from Barnard in 1964 and lived in a number of cities, but was glad to return to New York in the early 1970s. By this time, she had two children. Over the years, she had several jobs, including working with children who had cerebral palsy and teaching special education at a university. Rae also began writing plays at this time, including as part of a graduate program at Hunter College. Rae loved her time in New York, where she knew a community of people associated with Rockefeller University, many of whom had children who were the same age as her kids.
In 1977, Rae's husband brought the family to the Boston area. She lived in a house in Newton that she had never seen before the move. Within a year, she had separated from her husband. This was a difficult time for her-she wanted to return to New York but couldn't, she felt isolated in the suburbs, and she needed a job. In 1978, she found a position as director of Gateway Crafts (now Gateway Arts) in Brookline Village. She would stay there for 44 years, leading Gateway's growth from a small studio to a thriving arts therapy program providing opportunities for adults with disabilities to make and sell their art.
In 1982, Rae met Peter Gordon. When they first met, Peter said "if I talk to you for 15 minutes, I'll be with you for 15 years". He was right. They were together until 1998, when Peter died from ALS. Rae and Peter became joint parents to Rae's children, who loved him too.
Over the years in Newton, Rae worked at Gateway, wrote plays that were produced on stage (she was active with a group called Playwrights' Platform), and raised her children. Although she was allergic to cats, she allowed the family to take in a neighborhood stray, Orange Cat, who they all loved. Orange Cat killed squirrels, who were a constant menace to the roof on the house. Rae deeply loved swimming at Crystal Lake, where she performed a technique her kids called "the mommy breast stroke" (it involved keeping her head out of the water).
In her plays, Rae filled in gaps in her family's history. In one play, Reparations, a main character was based on a cousin she knew who had survived Auschwitz. Another play, Sophie Makes Good, centered on the life of Jewish immigrants to the U.S. Still another play, Nothing Like This But This, described the 18 months of Peter's decline from ALS, all of which he spent at home with Rae and other caregivers.
A few years after Peter died, Rae met Bruce Dow, who became her partner for 17 years. Rae and Bruce had a remarkable overlap in their lives before they met, having lived in many of the same places (even at the same times!) and knowing some of the same people. Rae loved Bruce and loved their time together on Cape Cod and in Jamaica Plain (where Rae moved in 2000).
As a prolific writer, Rae kept a diary for the year 1978, just after her move to Newton and her divorce. Rae described three goals: (1) finding a job that was a good fit for her (2) getting together with a man she loved and (3) writing a play that was produced. On the last page of her diary for 1978, she wrote "I think everything will work out for me if I hang in." She did and it did; she accomplished each of those goals and more.
Rae will be loved and remembered by those who know her, including Bruce, her kids (Chris and Jay), her four grandchildren, her cousin Sam Temkin, and her dear friends.
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SOUL MATES
a memoir
As I write these words from my semi-subterranean study at 241 Perkins Street, J-701, my partner and soul mate, Rae Edelson, is resting comfortably in a hospital bed upstairs in our bedroom. She is under hospice care, refusing food and water, and may be just days away from expiring. Yesterday, I sat by her bedside with my Apple Macintosh computer, and played her all the well-known songs from South Pacific, our favorite musical. My favorite line in the musical, from the song, Some Enchanted Evening, is "once you have found her, never let her go." This essay is an expansion on those words.
Rae Edelson and I have been partners for the past 17 years, starting on November 17, 2007, when we first met face-to-face, thanks to Match.com. We met at her workplace on Harvard Street in Brookline Village. The sign on the window said Gateway Arts. Inside, there was a gift shop containing various kinds of artwork produced by disabled artists. Rae was the director and founder of Gateway Arts. I knew this from her Match.com profile, and from our telephone conversation some days earlier.
On our meeting day she led me up a flight of stairs to the studio on the third floor. As we entered the studio I was overwhelmed by the sight of perhaps twenty artists with mostly mental and/or emotional disabilities (as she had told me ahead of time), working busily on their individual art projects. As a psychiatrist and neuroscientist, I found this scene quite beautiful, especially as it had been gradually created over the years by the woman standing beside me. What a wonderful world she had built! Before I fell in love with Rae Edelson, I fell in love with her work. After visiting the studio, we took a short walk around Brookline Village. Rae was modest about herself. She told me she believed she was not beautiful but was good-looking. I have found her very attractive to look at and be with, as well as easy to talk to. She was outgoing and honest in what she said, sometimes bluntly honest, like the time we were with my family members walking through a park and she said in a loud voice "Donald Trump is a "blankety blank". I won't say the actual word, but you know what I mean.
In the following days, I met with several other eligible women identified by Match.com as possible partners for me. I kept Rae Edelson somewhere in the back of my mind. One week later it was Thanksgiving. Several of my brothers and their families had gathered at my brother Chuck's home in Orleans, MA, at the eastern end of Cape Cod, a long drive from my apartment in Cambridge, perhaps 90 minutes (or more with traffic). I stayed overnight at Chuck's house after Thanksgiving Dinner. Chuck was the owner/manager of Acme Laundry in Hyannis and had been called in to work the next morning (Friday). I was left alone with his wife, Betsy, after the other guests had gone. I began thinking about Rae Edelson, and how far away she was from me. I suddenly wanted to be near her. On an impulse, I called her to tell her this, and she said she was free. I told her I would drive back to Jamaica Plain to see her and would be arriving in about 2 hours.
I drove back, over the Sagamore Bridge, and up Route 3 to the beltway highway around Boston, formerly called Route 128 (when I was growing up), but now a combination of Interstate Routes 93 and 95, and then onto Adams Avenue over Milton hill to Jamaica Plain. Rae's condominium was (and is) just on the boundary between Brookline and Jamaica Plain, overlooking Jamaica Pond. As I pulled into the parking lot, a man was coming down the steps from her front entranceway and walking to his car. Rae had mentioned that a male friend was there visiting with her (MIT physics professor, Walter Lewin), and would be leaving soon, before my expected arrival time. Perhaps I arrived sooner than she had expected. I know the route very well and made the trip faster than I had expected. It was interesting to me, walking across the parking lot, that I knew who the other man was, but he did not (yet) know who I was.
Rae buzzed me into the entryway of her condo complex and opened her front door to greet me. We walked into her living room, with a view out toward Jamaica Pond, and sat side-by-side on a long brown leather couch that still sits in her living room (just over my head from where I am writing). We sat and talked on and on for several hours. She cooked me a nice meal, and we talked some more. When I was ready to leave, we exchanged a big hug. I could feel her body pressing against my chest. It was a wonderful hug, and she was such a warm and caring woman. After that beautiful encounter I fully fell in love with Rae Edelson. It took only one week from our initial meeting at Gateway Arts. We have been soul mates ever since.
Of course, we have had our ups and downs. We are both very stubborn and determined about what we want. We argue a lot, but we love each other in all the ways that people can love. One bond between us is that we went to similar elite, liberal colleges: Barnard (her) and Wesleyan (me). She majored in physics and became a specialist in child development (one masters degree) and theater (another masters degree). I majored in English and French and became a psychiatrist and neuroscientist. She wrote many plays, several of which were performed on stage in New York and Boston. I did my honors thesis at Wesleyan on the plays of poet T.S. Eliot, one of Rae's and my favorite modern writers. Her science background helped her understand what I do; my liberal arts background helped me understand what she did.
Rae and I spent a colorful and rewarding 17 years together. We took a classy trip on our own, driving along the French Riviera, especially enjoying the Matisse Museum in Nice and the Picasso Museum in Antibes (across the water from Nice). On a different trip, to England, we loved visiting art museums in London and seeing our friends Jennie and Larry in Cambridge. Back home in this country, we have especially enjoyed the Southwest and Monument Valley, where the states of Utah, Colorado, Arizona, and New Mexico come together at the Four Corners. Another favorite place of ours is Bodega Bay on the Pacific Coast, just north of San Francisco, where Alfred Hitchcock filmed the movie, The Birds. Rae and I have enjoyed staying at the Bodega Bay Lodge, overlooking the ocean. We both loved visiting art museums in New York City, staying at the Excelsior Hotel on West 81st Street, just west of Central Park, dining at the restaurant, Nice Matin, on the upper West Side, and seeing our friends Linda Stein and Paul Vidich in SoHo. In Massachusetts we had a vacation home in Osterville on Cape Cod, and also enjoyed driving out Route 2 to the Berkshires during the Fall foliage season. We had a full life together, along with our two jobs, hers at Gateway Arts in Brookline, mine as a clinical psychiatrist on Cape Cod. We both worked for the same company, Vinfen, in Cambridge.
Now I would like to explain what I mean by saying that Rae and I are soul mates, and why I am so moved by Rodgers and Hammerstein's "once you was have found her, never let her go". It took me many years to find Rae Edelson. My birthday is October 30, 1938. I met Rae on November 17, 2007, just a few weeks after my 69th birthday. That's a long time to wait. Far too long. Why did it take so long?
I could certainly have met her earlier. She grew up in Hartford, CT. I grew up in Newton, MA (just west of Boston). When she was starting high school in Hartford in 1956, I was starting college at Wesleyan, in Middletown, CT, just 30 miles down the Connecticut River from her. The next chance we had was in 1963 or 1964, in Rochester, NY, when I was in my 2nd year of medical school, and she was with her husband Paul, doing graduate studies after college. We both actually lived on the same street, Raleigh Street, near Strong Memorial Hospital, just a few doors away from each other. I may have caught sight of her, attractive, with dark brown wavy hair, walking alone in a park near where we all lived. I thought of going up to the woman but didn't. I have no idea if it was Rae, but it could have been, as she lived nearby.
Our third chance to meet was in 1976-77. Rae and her first husband Paul were moving from New York to Boston, with their two young children, Chris and Nick (later Jay). At about the same time, my parents were selling their house at 81 Avalon Road in Waban (one of the villages of Newton) and moving to Centerville on Cape Cod after my father's retirement at age 62. Rae and Paul ended up buying a house on Hinckley Road in Waban just about the time that my parents were selling their home. The two houses are only a few blocks apart (3 minutes by car), an amazing coincidence. Because of that, I have always thought of Rae as "the girl next door", although in different eras. The way I might have met Rae then is if I had driven (with my family) from Buffalo, NY, to visit my parents, which I did every year, usually in the summer, and Rae (and family) had stopped in to look at the house when it was up for sale. Of course, Rae would have been with her husband (Paul) and their children, and I would have been with my wife (Ann) and our children, so the encounter would have been more social than romantic. This imagined encounter is purely fantasy. Even if we had met, it would have been too late. Our lives were already established.
I think one of the explanations for all these coincidences is that Rae's first husband Paul was a doctor and I am a doctor. Paul and I traveled in the same circles. We both experienced the doctors draft during the Vietnam War. I served at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), near Washington, DC. Paul served at the Rockefeller Institute in New York City. We both did medical research during our two years with the US Public Health Service. I spent several weeks at Rockefeller Institute later in my career, as well as at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital in New York. Paul was trained at Columbia and ended up there. Paul and I both applied to Rochester Medical School. I got accepted there; he did not. I went to Rochester because Harvard Medical School turned me down. Paul's son Chris later got accepted at Harvard Law School. My daughter Sara went to Penn Medical School. So Rae and I both existed in the world of northeastern US higher education, especially in the professions. Her two sons both have law degrees. My son and daughter are both doctors in the medical field. Rae's first husband Paul and I were both drawn to Boston due to its extensive medical research. He came here in 1977. I left here in the mid 1950's and came back 50 years later in 2007.
It seems clear, now, that Rae and I were meant for each other, though my background was Protestant and hers was Jewish. Neither of us was religious by the time we met. We were both "humanists", with values based on democracy (from the Greeks) and liberalism (from the European "Enlightenment" movement). Rae and I were both "woke" and proud of it. We were opposed to authoritarianism. I went through three unsuccessful marriages before I met Rae. The first one lasted 6 months, the second one 12 years, the third one 24 years. Perhaps I made better choices as I matured. Finally, at age 69, I made an even better choice. Rae and I were lucky to meet as we did. Kudos to Match.com for matching us up. I am grateful for the 17 beautiful years we spent together.