Hopelessly Devoted to Olivia - Hello

Most of the article similar to the UK edition.

The Olivia I Knew by Amy Sky

For Canadian singer-songwriter Amy Sky, Olivia was a collaborator, a friend, a soul sister.

Introduced in the 1980s, when Olivia was looking for female songwriters to work with, the pair wrote their first song together for Olivia's 1988 album, The Rumour.

We had an immediate bond, says Amy, 61. Over the years, they teamed up on a number of projects — sometimes with Amy as producer, a writer a vocal partner - including Grace and Gatitude in 2006 and Liv On (featuring American singer-songwriter Beth Nielsen Chapman) in 2016.

Inspired by experiences of love and loss, the albums reflected Olivia's genuine hope to foster healing. Amy, who recently released He Sang, She Sang a duet album with her husband, Marc Jordan, shares some sweet memories of her friend.

Olivia and I, we did a lot of thinking about the grief process [over the years], so I have a lot of insight into what I'm going through. I’ll be honest — I’m kind of in denial, pretending she’s still here. That's the way I'm coping.

Her positivity was truly an active choice. I think back to Grace and Gratitude That album was made in the wake of a very deep loss for her — of her partner Patrick, who had disappeared. Her way of coping was for us to talk and write back and forth. She would send me fragments of writing.

After about six months, I said, Listen, why don’t we get together. So I went to her house in Californian and we wrote the whole album in a week.

There were little things about Olivia: she always took a moment before she ate and thanked the world for providing food. Thanked the spirit for the health; and sometimes we’d hold hands and say a little grace before a meal. She never took that for granted. When we would be working in the studio and we’d take a break, she would walk outside and turn her face up to the sun, turn her palms to it. She would just smile, soak up the sun.

She loved flowers. If you were out on a walk with her she would literally stop and smell the roses (laughs). And, really, one of her deepest loves in the whole world were animals. Her dogs, her horses, her chickens. She was very connected with nature. It wasn’t one of those New Age kind of things that she spoke about but didn't do; that's how she lived her life.

When we wrote race and Gratitude she said, I want these words on my tombstone — ‘Thank you for life, thank you for everything. I stand here in grace and gratitude — and I thank you.’ This is my philosophy. This is how I felt about life.

She ever wanted anyone to feel sorry for her; she didn't see the things that happened to her as any sort of punishment. She understood that it was life. And it was just an opportunity to appreciate life more.

The latest project we worked on was Liv On. Ironically, on the last day of our tour, she was diagnosed with the cancer recurrence.

It was almost like we started the project because she lost her sister to cancer (in 2013] and she was trying to deal with that loss. And my mother had passed the year before. So we were talking a lot about how grief changes your life.

Olivia always had a very inquiring mind. She would immediately go, If I’m feeling this, struggling with this, other people must be as well. And I, as an artist, have an opportunity to illuminate the path for other people as I discover how to cope.

I’m writing a Broadway musical called Beyond that’s inspired by the themes of Liv On, in particular the idea that we might be able to communicate with our loved ones after they pass. Olivia was excited to have been part of the inspiration for the show, and loved that idea and hoped to believe it herself.

I spoke with her four weeks before she passed. I don’t think she knew the end was near, but in speaking with her, I could sense her energy had changed. She sounded fragile. And when she answered my question How are you? (with a laugh and) I'm alive...I was reading between the lines, I was going, OK... I could feel the energy ebbing and I was quite concerned. So I wasn't unprepared for news like this, but then I got the call from John saying, There’s been a turn and you might want to say goodbye.

He called two days before she passed, and he was amazing: anyone who was within physical distance came by to say goodbye to her in person. I was in Canada, they were in California, and we we re able to communicate with her over the phone.

John sent an e-mail to both Beth and I, and we decided we wanted to say goodbye to her together. Because, you know, the three of us were close; when we were making the Liv On project, Olivia said, You know, you girls are my sisters now. And she'd lost her sister. We thought of ourselves as soul sisters because we were sharing the most intimate and vulnerable parts of ourself. We really bonded, had a lot fun and a lot of laughs.

Because you’ve got to laugh at life, even the hardest parts of life. She had the greatest laugh. We'd laugh till we cried. One of the cruellest things, I think, is to lose someone and not have the chance to say goodbye while they're still drawing breath. So I got to tell her one more time that I loved her, and I feel certain that she heard it. It was such a blessing to have that closure.

As told to Michael Killingsworth