Ellen Healy (1962-2007)

Anna Vogel Purnell

Sat, 1 Mar 2008 07:47:37 -0600

Ellen

My memory of Ellen is gold and
    quick and young
    and beautiful and
    serious.

Detective work. What does it mean
    to be girls
    to be the girls
    with short hair
    and strong ideas
    tough
    sweet
    scared

My memory of Ellen is
    friendship
    and kindness
    skinned knees
    blood sisters

The departures of adulthood
    mean nothing
    erase nothing
    of the memory

The sweetness of memory
The sorrow that it is only memory
the permanence
    of those short haired girls
    tough, sweet, scared,
           sacred.

By Anna Vogel Purnell
Madison, Wisconsin
11/18/2007

Ellen and Anna were best friends
on Menlo Boulevard during several
years of elementary school.

Craig Stone, Sarah’s Husband

Thu, 15 Nov 2007 01:18:08 -0600

I married Sarah, in part because of Ellen. I was attracted to Sarah because she had friends like Ellen. She and Sarah were family together and I wanted to have that kind of family.

And as when my parents moved out of state, I was not only sad when Ellen moved away from Milwaukee. I knew Sarah and I would become nostalgic for the time we spent with Ellen.

Together, Sarah and I are much happier than we ever were before we met. She paid me a very high compliment the other day. Sarah said that when we met she sensed we could become the kind of friends her and Ellen were.

Ellen was easy to love and it's harder to let her go this time.
Saturday, November 10, 2007 - 03:40 PM

Nancy Peske Darrow

Sat, 10 Nov 2007 11:03:30 -0600

The last time I saw Ellen, she had a blue tongue and was standing outside the Oriental Pharmacy. I was in town from NYC with my husband, who had never met Ellen, and we'd decided to hook up and go bowling. His first comment to her was, "Uh, do you know you have a blue tongue?" and she explained that she'd just gone into the Oriental to buy something and, at the checkout, spotted some candy from her childhood and felt she just had to try it again, and had forgotten that it turns your tongue a neon blue. She convinced us that we should try it too, so we went in, bought whatever it is, and went bowling with our trio of blue tongues. It occurred to me that Ellen was the sort of person who didn't just accept that blue tongues are the consequence of trying new things, but the type of person who would walk into an ordinary scene, see what's new or unusual, and engage with it.
Ellen taught me the meaning of joie de vivre, with that wonderful laugh that spilled out about every thirty seconds, and those big brown eyes that widened with excitement whenever she talked with passion, which was pretty much all the time. She got me to spend hours in a pagan-like ecstasy dancing wildly to a four-sided Hendrix album fueled by nothing other than teenage energy. She taught me that biology class is a lot more fun when you spend the dull moments writing poems and song lyrics and drawing goofy pictures. She taught me it's important to dance even when you're in a cast up to your knee, and to let the barricudas pass you by without stopping you from exploring a coral reef (although I'm not sure I'd have the courage to do that myself!).
I'm sad to think of how little time I spent with Ellen after she moved to Colorado and I moved to New York City, but she her spirit had a tremendous impact on me. Its some comfort to know that other people, too, were lucky enough to know her and experience her incredible vitality.

Adolph and Suzanne Rosenblatt

Fri, 9 Nov 2007 13:53:51 -0600

The phone rang just as we were about to leave for the evening. "It's Jon Healy. Are you both sitting down? I have some grave news." Maybe I'd misunderstood. Grave sounds like great in a world full of wishes that can't come true. Strange. A voice comes over the phone line. I don't want to hear it, yet I want to know. So I listened in a
nightmare state. Jon's sister, Ellen, was hit by a pickup truck that morning. He hadn't said yet whether or not she was still alive. I waited, hoped. But there was no hope. She'd been declared brain dead.

My mind filled with images of Ellen, tried to erase that final one. She was more than Sarah's friend, was close to our whole family. I suddenly wanted to be sure: were she and Sarah really only four years old when they met? I looked through my old Hallmark date books. Yes. June 24, 1967, was their first play date. I'd wanted Sarah to meet
another child going to JCC day camp. And that child turned out to be Ellen. Ellen's spirit, the oomph combined with innocence that sparked their friendship 40 years ago, never changed. Part of her became an adult, yet she kept the child within.

Ellen was unique, truly unique, simply herself, no pretenses,
enthusiastic about life and learning, off the wall in the best
possible way. And creative, always ready to play, always inventive. And brilliant. Her PHD professor said she was one of the best students he'd ever had.

I used to go out dancing with my kids and their friends. Ellen and I had a special electricity, would mime crazy, anything goes, skits to the music, even when her leg was in a cast. She collaborated with me when I started performing, acting out one of my short stories. Sarah and Ellen had that same sort of electricity. One summer they painted together in the Shorewood alleyways, inspired each others' company. I
never saw the paintings Ellen did that summer, but I know Sarah's were some of her best.

Ellen often came to our family dinners with the Leplaes, a lively presence in our games of charades, story-writing, pictionary, or whatever else we figured out to play. After she moved away from Milwaukee, she and I always made sure we'd take a bike ride together whenever she visited.

Ellen's life wasn't easy, was haunted by illness and accidents, falling out of trees, sledding into one. She seemed to take it all in stride. She had facial surgery as a result of the sledding accident. When we visited her in the hospital, she looked like Little Lulu, yet didn't appear at all nonplussed, didn't have to apologize for her swollen face.

Ellen's core, her intense interior life, always showed through. She cared about nature, about the arts, about the world, cared about friends and family. And we all cared about her. You certainly get a sense of the impact she had on others' lives when you read the blogs written
here. And I hope anyone reading this in the Milwaukee area will come to the memorial service at Rosenblatt Gallery, located over Artasia at 181 N. Broadway, on Saturday, November 17, at 1:30 PM. I'll post this on my Shorewood blog (Ellen grew up in Shorewood), and if any of you want to make comments or add memories about Ellen on that, too, please feel free. http://blogs.shorewoodnow.com/between_yesterday_and_tomorrow/

The world needs more people like Ellen, but tragically we have one less.

John Nieto-Phillips

Thu, 8 Nov 2007 07:14:11 -0600

Thanks, everyone, for sharing your experiences and friendship with Ellen. Many of you have said things much better than I can.  And thanks, Sandie, for creating this memorial to honor her.

I hadn't seen Ellen in about 14 years, since I left LA for New Mexico and other destinations.  I had heard she had embarked on a new career helping people, which made perfect sense to me.  She loved people and people loved her back.

At UCLA in the early ‘90s, we had been roommates in that Neutra apartment on Strathmore, the one with that great curved glass wall.  She and I and the other four roommates spent nights talking, drinking wine, smoking, arguing.

Ellen sometimes had energy to burn.  And burn she did, apparently, that one night she started a bon fire in the living room and did a devilish dance around it.

Other times, she was simply a great, compassionate listener.  She loved to share her command of philosophy, but never condescended to neophytes like me.

Etched in my memory are Ellen’s laughter, her expressive, paddling hands, rolling eyes, and quizzical pucker.  But more than anything, Ellen's bold embrace of life and new experiences, and her love of people and ideas remains with us all.