NEW YORK (AP) — The first line of Olivia Harrison’s poetry collection conveys a universal feeling for anyone who has lost a loved one. “All I wanted was another spring,” she writes. “Was it so much to ask?”
Through the verses that follow that question, the widow of former Beatle George Harrison talks about her husband and the grief after he died of lung cancer on November 29, 2001, at age 58.
Twenty poems for 20 years, a number that is no coincidence.
“Came the Lightning,” a collection published Tuesday, is a first for 74-year-old Harrison and a surprise. She has painstakingly curated George’s work with the help of their son, Dhani, but otherwise maintained the privacy the couple maintained throughout their marriage.
She was inspired to write by reading the work of Edna St Vincent Millay about a “wound that never heals,” and her own phrase about wanting another feather was a turning point. She changed her mind after initially deciding not to make it public.
“It was because he was a good guy,” she said in an interview with The Associated Press. “A good guy. And I thought, ‘I want people to know these things.’ So many people think they know who George is, I thought he deserved this from me, to let people know something more personal.”
She writes about the mundane moments of a marriage that become more special when they can’t be repeated – the nighttime dancing on a jukebox in their living room, how her cold feet sought the warmth of him under the covers on a winter’s night.
George Harrison met the former Olivia Arias in the 1970s while working at his Los Angeles record company. A poem recalls her nervousness when she first welcomed him into the modest home of her Mexican immigrant parents. “He said, ‘It’s a mansion compared to my childhood,'” she wrote.
She remembers first welcoming her to his estate in Friar Park west of London with the kind words, “Olivia, welcome home.”
They arrived in “John and Yoko’s Long White Car”. It was another hint that she wouldn’t marry just anyone, along with her description of the day “the legendary Slowhand stopped by the ex-Mrs.”
That would be Eric Clapton, with George’s ex-wife Patti.
Uncomfortable!
“It seemed to be this love triangle legend,” Harrison said. “I thought I’d try to wrap it up in three verses.”
Her husband never spoke publicly about the loss of his first wife to Clapton, and Harrison’s poem indicates that things were not going well. “Predictable exchanges and yes, they ended badly,” she wrote.
Harrison also writes extensively about the harrowing night of December 30, 1999, when a deranged man broke into Friar Park with a knife. She remembered begging George to stay hidden in the bedroom, but instead he went downstairs to confront him and was stabbed in the ensuing struggle. Olivia attacked the intruder with a fireplace poker and, against all odds, they both survived.
“I wouldn’t say it was a defining moment, but it was such a profound experience that I still can’t believe it,” she said. “George almost died and you think, no, he won’t die like that. In that sense he was a very challenging person – I’m not going to die like this. That’s what he thought at the time. Am I going to die like this after everything I’ve been through?’
Nineteen years earlier, she’d called in the middle of the night that John Lennon had died, and they’d been curled up under their covers for hours.
Though George died less than two years after the attack on Friar Park, she regarded it as “a victory, not a loss.”
“It was a win because he went out on his own terms the way he wanted,” she said. “It was something he regretted that John Lennon didn’t have the chance.”
Harrison tenderly writes of the day her husband died: “I wish you would leave without any hindrance of care, to float away as you had always imagined and prepared. I couldn’t help but sniff your ear and whisper the last words to leave you with my sound.”
Their son was 23 when George died. Harrison said she is constantly amazed to hear him talk about things she didn’t know his father had told him.
“Whether it was something for the sake of history, or a mantra, or a lesson, I thought he didn’t wait until (Dhani) was 30 or 40,” she said. ‘That is also a real lesson. Why are we holding back? Why are we so limited by time? George didn’t live like that. Maybe he was farsighted. Maybe he knew.”
In the book, she also writes about Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr’s final visits to say goodbye to their former Beatles buddy.
Now she and Dhani sit at the boardroom table with McCartney, Starr and Yoko Ono as the Beatles’ affairs are discussed. It’s an ongoing endeavor in many ways, such as with last year’s Peter Jackson-produced “Get Back” project.
“Dhani and I are really there to look after George’s legacy,” she said. “We are stubborn about some things. But about other things I’m like, ‘it’s their music, it’s their images… they know what they want to hear and see. It’s great to herd and provide George’s equipment and help them in any way possible.”
Plus, she said, it’s a lot of fun.
It wasn’t until the anthology project in the 1990s that George became more comfortable with the Beatles’ legacy, she said.
“He said, ‘I don’t think it’s going away.’ I said it isn’t. He was so funny. I said, no, it isn’t and he said, ‘Okay, maybe I’ll get some respect here,'” she said, laughing.
Harrison still lives on the Friar Park estate. She’s too old to move, she said, and too much stuff has been collected. She and her husband were both avid gardeners, and a hint as to why she stays comes in a poem that speaks of the trees there: “My constant source of comfort, my oldest, longest friends,” she writes.
She also writes about “one more meeting, I wrote the scene, where I get one last thing off my chest.”
What might that meeting look like?
“It would probably be in the garden,” she said. “Just sitting in the yard, (where he’d say) ‘Aren’t you glad I planted that tree there?'”
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