Elaine Parker Barlow, born Aug. 31, 1948, to Esther Lucille Parker and Earl Kenneth Parker in Colorado Springs, Colo., completed her earthly sojourn on the evening of Jan. 16, 2022, in Los Angeles, surrounded by family. From humble origins east of the Colorado Rockies, her life gathered force to become a mighty river whose comings and goings touched and nourished and transformed countless lives along its 73-year course.
Growing up in Colorado Springs with her parents and older siblings Ronald Lee and Phyllis Jean, Elaine developed a love of music, literature, fine arts and nature. When she was a junior at Palmer High School, she met John Perry Barlow, then a student at nearby Fountain Valley School. Subsequent to her graduation in 1966 she lived for several years in New Haven, Conn., where her brother Ronald attended Yale University. There, fresh tributaries and influences added to her love of art and culture. During the mid-70s, John Perry courted her with increasing ardor; by then he had taken over management of the Bar Cross Land and Livestock Company, the 22,000-acre Barlow family ranch near Cora, Wyo. They married at the Bar Cross during summer solstice of 1977.
From the time she married John Perry to the time they sold the ranch in 1987, she kept the hearth fires burning at the Bar Cross, which, mind you, was no ordinary hearth-tending enterprise. The ranch became a kind of way-station for a motley cavalcade of ranch hands, cowboys, drifters, misfits, renegades, artists and vagabonds. For Elaine, keeping the hearth went way beyond feeding and nurturing everyone during Wyoming’s two seasons – winter and August – it meant also dealing with a full spectrum of flaws and foibles, disorders and addictions, skirmishes and calamities – resulting, on rare occasions, in the use of firearms, chainsaws and dynamite – all of which Elaine somehow balanced with grit and equanimity, humor and forbearance, fortitude and grace. Over and over, the inevitable heartaches and shocks of life on this somewhat raw-boned frontier simultaneously revealed and annealed Elaine’s unbreakable spirit.
It turned out that keeping the hearth fires burning at the Bar Cross was but a prelude to much grander endeavors. During that decade she gave birth to three brilliant daughters: Leah Justine, on June 20, 1982; Anna Winter, on Oct. 14, 1984; and Amelia Rose, on July 15, 1986. All that she had previously learned about caring for others gathered force in her devotion to Leah, Anna and Amelia. No doubt many hands and hearts helped raise these extraordinary human beings, but who can possibly imagine the miracles Elaine somehow pulled off day by day, with quiet grace, while raising her daughters?
When the ranch sold in 1987, the family moved roughly 13 miles from the Bar Cross to Pinedale. Once there, Elaine became increasingly involved in the civic life of the town, working to improve the library, the arts council, the health clinic and the museum, eventually serving a four-year term as board member for the Sublette County School District. Pinedale’s award-winning public schools were very much at the heart of the town’s cultural life and being a board member brought Elaine’s extraordinary passions and gifts into focus: She played a key role guiding Pinedale’s children toward the possibility of becoming responsible heirs of human culture.
In the following years, Elaine’s capacities to care for, support, heal, guide and forgive others informed her growth and deepened the currents of her life. Her soul’s mighty river flowed on and gathered strength all through her lifelong love for and devotion to her sister Phyllis, through her separation and divorce from John Perry, through the coming of age of her daughters, who remained the dearest loves of her life, through the birth in 2017 of her granddaughter Willah Brave Barlow Dunwoody, through the death in 2018 of John Perry, through countless joys and sorrows, births and losses, culminating in the rather sudden death this past August of her oldest daughter, Leah.
Nowhere in her life of caring for others was her capacity for love more abundantly felt than in the space she held for Leah, Anna and Amelia – and, in time, for Willah. No matter the circumstance, they always knew that in her heart, in her arms, there remained all the room in the world for them to breathe, laugh, cry, dance and just be. The truth is she held that space for everyone. At a recent memorial to celebrate Leah’s life, her love flowered from the depths of grief: She danced in the crowd, spreading the nourishing river of her life among us, the living. Elaine showed us what a great soul makes possible on this Earth.
Thanks to her sister Phyllis, we have one of Elaine’s favorite literary passages, very fitting for this moment, from Willa Cather’s novel My Antonia:
“I was something that lay under the sun and felt it, like the pumpkins, and I did not want to be anything more. I was entirely happy. Perhaps we feel like that when we die and become part of something entire, whether it is sun and air, or goodness and knowledge. At any rate, that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great. When it comes to one, it comes as naturally as sleep.”
Rest in power and peace, dear Elaine. A public memorial and celebration of her life is scheduled for June 25, 2022, in Pinedale. The family plans to announce details with regard to time and location in the weeks leading up to the ceremony. All will be welcome.
