Hazel didn’t have much time to miss Elizabeth: among other things, she was busy with her new great-granddaughter. But relationships of such intensity don’t just die; more than a year after they’d last seen one another, Hazel was trying to patch things up.
Only once in her life had she ever flown anywhere by herself, and never before had she set foot in New England. But in September 2001 she hopped on a plane to Hartford, then headed by car to Sheffield, Massachusetts. That was where the Option Institute, an organization she had learned of through her self-help explorations, held weeklong workshops. The group, founded by a man named Barry Neil Kaufman, posited that through sheer will, one could improve one’s destiny. The hilly, wooded terrain en route reminded her of rural Arkansas, though in New England there were fewer rusted automobiles strewn about.
Coretta Scott King had endorsed the program, and Hazel hoped that maybe she, or Kaufman, could reach out to Elizabeth and revive their relationship. Maybe Elizabeth could come back with her at some point, she thought, and Kaufman could mediate. She brought the poster with her, and was set to meet Kaufman on September 12. But first came September 11. Alone in a remote place, without televisions and with only spotty cell phone coverage, Hazel grew so frightened by the events of that day that she called Elizabeth, and the two spoke briefly. She also called Antoine, who promptly drove up nearly nonstop from Little Rock to retrieve her. She and Kaufman never did meet.
Less than a month later Hazel and Elizabeth spoke again. This time, it was Elizabeth calling, to report that Will Counts, who had been battling cancer, had died. Elizabeth went to his memorial service in Bloomington; the picture of her and Hazel hung alongside other Counts photographs in an anteroom of the church. Dozens of Counts’s disciples attended; one of them, Michel duCille of the Washington Post, who had won three Pulitzer Prizes, gave the eulogy. He was amazed that, as he spoke of Elizabeth, he could look out—and there she was. Hazel didn’t attend, but in a note to his widow, she described Counts as someone who had “touched so many lives both personally and professionally.” Who would have known this better than she? In separate interviews, the two related how Counts had brought them together. “In no time we were old friends,” Hazel told one reporter, revealing nothing about what had happened since. Elizabeth and Hazel had communicated for the last time. But it was not the last time one of them tried.