Tag: r.i.p.

Goodbye Stephen Elliott: best cook, best smile, best father.

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Stephen Elliott, the closest thing I ever had to an adopted father, passed away on the morning of September 1st.

Stephen, Tim

I was at Burning Man, so could not be bedside. I also missed his memorial. Yesterday would have been his 67th birthday. I do not feel guilt or regret, only grief.

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It was a privilege to know him and to receive a small part of his generosity, cleverness, and joy. Somewhere there is a video of him playing Spanish guitar at one of my birthday parties, as pictured above, but that doesn’t capture his vivaciousness or his overwhelming wonderful everything. They don’t make them like they used to. He was quality and charm and grace personified, as well as the best sort of sly English wit. I don’t know what else to say, except that he was loved, and is loved, and will always be so in my heart. My sympathies and condolences to everyone else currently grieving. He was prolific with his care, there are so many of us who will forever miss him, and we are all worse off for the loss.

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it will feel like injustice when the sun begins to rise

One of the brightest spots in my entire life has just been torn away by a car crash.
I am really, very deeply, not even a little bit okay.

Michael Green was killed in a car crash this morning.

CBC news has some of the details.

It’s very likely that very few of you know what our relationship was or what he means to me – as very public people sometimes do, we had a very private connection – but Michael lines this journal like silver. He is, in many ways, why large swaths of it exist and why I have persisted in spite of so much of the pain that has come my way. He lifted me out of darkness. My darling Michael Thomas Green, one of the most important people in my adult life, his care and support, even at such a distance, sometimes have been my only secret weapon against the coming of the night.

I don’t know what I’ll do now that he’s gone. I’m in tears. I’m in shock. I am scraped raw.

this is not a temporary error

Vancouver poet Zaccheus Jackson’s death by train in Toronto ‘an absolute tragedy’
36-year-old Alberta native is remembered as a passionate educator who was “just fully coming into his power” as a spoken-word poet of Blackfoot descent.

Zaccheus was a good person as well as a good poet. He was a bright light, easy to recognize even at a distance, and he shone constantly and tirelessly and true. Even though I met him years ago, he was one of the only people who could still coax me to come out to a poetry slam.

I am sorry I didn’t get to know him better. I am grateful for how much I did.

Always remember to tell people when you love them. Nothing is permanent. There is no such thing as the future. There is now and then there is maybe, possibly, only potentially a later version of now. Tell people you appreciate them, that they move you, that you respect them, that their taste in clothes is nice, that the way they move is graceful, that you like how they place their hands on the wheel of the car as they drive, that you adore when they sing along to the radio, that their stutter is appealing, that their guitar face is ravishing, that your admiration for their way with words is endless and honest, that you are attracted to them, that you are in awe of how silly they can be, that you think it’s great that thing they did one time, you remember, with the fork and their niece, that thing, you still think about them, you think about them and you smile, that you think about them and cry, that you think about them, that you miss them, that you sympathize, that you admire and recognize their efforts, that you grasp what they are trying to say, that you regard their puns as a necessary evil, that you commend their sensitivity, that you respond to their touch, that you feel the world is better with them in it, that you worship their cooking, that you long for more time with them, that you idolize the same values, that you are fascinated by the same things, that you hold them dear, that you have had your mind changed by their point of view, that you dig their taste in music, that you value their opinion, that you applaud their parenting, that you esteem their criticism, that you enjoy the way they make you laugh, that you luxuriate in their attention, that you treasure their affection, that their approval makes you happy, that you want to make them proud, that they inspire pride, that you care for them, that they satisfy your curiosity, that they are sweet, that they are treasured, that that shirt matches their eyes, that you’re glad to have met them, that it’s no problem to help out, that you are glad to be of service, that you accept their charity, that they are cherished, that they are anything and everything, that we, each one of us, is the world. Remember and tell them and love and love and love.

“The fastest we live is still the slowest we die.” – Zaccheus

Tell them, your friends, your loved ones, but the acquaintances, too. Tell everyone. Fight against the inevitable coming of night.

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She’s Still Dying On Facebook

“On March 2, more than four years ago now, Lea died of substance-abuse-related liver failure. June 10 would have been her 27th birthday. This time of year is when she’s always most on my mind, and I’m sure that some Facebook technician who keeps track of what we all do on the site would report that my visits to Lea’s profile increase exponentially as the weather gets warmer. I don’t know how, exactly, I managed to open up my old messages with Lea. I want to say that Facebook put the messages there—that I didn’t click the button, that they just appeared, Lea’s face popping up because she had something to say, she wanted to chat. But I must have clicked. Maybe by accident. Still, I can’t ignore the pull of my bookworm’s interpretation, arguing that technology is the closest human beings come to magic. I know nothing about the way the Internet works. I still half-believe the Internet is simply air. So why isn’t it plausible that Lea’s messages appeared in response to how much I miss her, to my own guilt about her death.

[…]

Lea died the first time soon after she joined Facebook, when I witnessed her transformation into someone she would have mocked and pitied. She died again, a smaller death, a year or so before her real-world one, when she basically stopped posting altogether. On March 2, she died publicly, her wall turning into the memorial it is now. To me, she’s died again and again since then. The posts remembering her are fewer and fewer, months apart sometimes. When I rediscovered our messages, she died again—in a different way, because I’d come face to face with how I failed her. Facebook has made her death a sort of high-concept horror movie. How many more times will I grieve her? How many more details from my past, from Lea’s past, are buried online, waiting for me to uncover them?”

With Andrew gone, it’s time to pick up the slack he’s left behind.

“Meaning”
by Czeslaw Milosz

—When I die, I will see the lining of the world.
The other side, beyond bird, mountain, sunset.
The true meaning, ready to be decoded.
What never added up will add up,
What was incomprehensible will be comprehended.

—And if there is no lining to the world?
If a thrush on a branch is not a sign,
But just a thrush on the branch? If night and day
Make no sense following each other?
And on this earth there is nothing except this earth?

—Even if that is so, there will remain
A word wakened by lips that perish,
A tireless messenger who runs and runs
Through interstellar fields, through the revolving galaxies,
And calls out, protests, screams.

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Andrew was barely in his forties, an acting father of three, a husband, a lover, and, as he would say, “all of the things”! Essential to at least three of my neighborhood’s core communities, he was a precious friend I never imagined doing without. He fell suddenly, an aneurysm or a stroke, the sort of death that unfurls its red flag without warning. I could list facts: his love of pirate clothing, his irrepressible fever for wordplay, his drawings, his games, the entire shelf of books on Rome that served as the incubator for a project that will never blossom from its imaginary blueprint seed. None of it will properly convey who he was, what sort of life he created to inhabit and to share, so the narrative that I have decided upon is to declare him the laughing buddha, the zen creature without public ego who didn’t give in to the idea that we should care what strangers think of us. Monks in saffron robes suffer on mountain tops while he found illumination in the way dice moved over a table, the way foam wrapped sticks bounced off other foam wrapped sticks, and a thousand other nerdy occupations I have never really understood but didn’t need to in order to appreciate him and his glee. We bonded over shiny things, science, dancing, and the regular delights of mangled days. All of that, years of it, but I cannot convey the map of his nation’s borders. He was smart and he was good and we miss him. Everything else is set dressing.

It doesn’t seem so long ago since I last ran into him on Commercial Drive, floppy hat, massive cloak, somewhere probably a drum. The man wore tutus and face-paint as commonly as other people wear socks. He was easy to spot. Was, not is. I write that word and lose my courage. It doesn’t seem long because it wasn’t, yet it will never happen again.

I offered to take his picture before he was cremated, something for the family, something for us, an image to represent the man we all loved. I didn’t even think about it, it was as natural as offering my hand to someone sitting on the ground, and his widow said yes and thank you and we agreed. This left me standing by his coffin at the crematorium two hours before the service, my friend Jay acting as a driver and a voice activated light stand, kit in hand and a bag full of expensive lenses I had never used before.

Though it was surreal, I was fine until I bumped the coffin, reflexively apologizing to his cold face, and when I touched him, brushing hair to cover some of the bruising that the make-up didn’t cover. Excepting those moments, I had a skill set to wield, he could have been made of spring flowers, a still life empty of residual heat. He has too obviously absent, an unmanned puppet, only a former body of work, still bones, still skin. An object encased in love and lighting problems to solve.

Fast forward, I stood with his family, perhaps the only one present who wasn’t tied to him through marriage or blood, the last of the last, in the final moments before he was taken away and sublimated into shimmering air molecules and carbon. Tillie couldn’t be there, but AJ read out a note from her, a prayer for the living who stood in a circle around Andrew’s abandoned body. I watched everyone, I watched and I ached and part of me died, and I made my own strident promises: May we remember this and resolve not to let it go. May we forever refuse to stand still.

Devorah

There’s something about the smell of the place that clings to my skin. Perhaps it’s a disinfectant or the lotion she rubs on her skin. Possibly a mix of them both. Either way, it has become the scent of her dying and it won’t let me sleep. As soon as I am home, I step into the shower to rinse it off, knowing that I am sluicing her touch from my body as well and uncertain if it should feel like a betrayal.

Her name isn’t one I mention here. We’re unrelated by DNA. Until recently, for almost a decade, I only saw her on Jewish holidays. The entire story is more complicated, a byzantine web of different familial relationships, but the truth remains, and it all boils down to this one simple fact: My mother is dying.

She has severe young onset Parkinson’s and she is not going to improve. She is not going to rally. She is not going to be saved by a miracle, a drug, or by therapy. It is a degenerative disease of the central nervous system that currently does not have a known cause or cure and kills her brain cells in certain types of pathways, destroying her body from the inside. Her symptoms are typical and so is the progress of the disease. The medication they have her on at the care home help, but they are gradually becoming ineffective. Other than her body failing, her symptoms include memory loss, inability to focus or stay present, mild paranoia, depression, and slight dementia. There is no recovery. Nothing about this will get better. It will not “be okay”. Her failure is inevitable.

I try to visit at least once a week. I try to always bring some kind of treat. (Otherwise, the chances are high that she might not eat that day). I bring flowers and movies on a memory stick. I bring printed out pictures of her loved ones that I tape to the wall where she can see them from her bed. I offer her my service in any way I can. I joke that she has won a life-time supply of chocolate, now that the end of her life is close enough that I can finally afford to guarantee such a magnificent promise.

We lie in her bed together and she snuggles up to my body the way I used to press into hers when I was five. Her body has wasted away so much that she barely has any substance at all, so there are no problems fitting both of us in her hospital style bed. She is so fragile, it is hard to believe. I could probably carry her a mile in my arms. Instead I support her shaking limbs and brush shea butter onto her skin with my fingers and try not to count her vertebrae. I love her so, so much.

She has other daughters, but I am special in that I am a bridge, the physical avatar and “child” of her relationship with my godmother, her best friend of over 30 years. My visits ground her as very little does. And I touch her constantly. I can’t not. Even when I sit on the floor at her feet, we twine ankles, we perpetually hold hands.

We discuss everything. About when I was a child, about when she was a child, our loves, our relationships, our disasters, but also activism, feminism, poetry, technology, sociology, history, literature, religion, psychology, education, and nanotech. When she is present, she is clear, intelligent, and sharp. Her life has been endlessly inspiring, one of bravery and protests and marches and academia and marathons and that spark still exists sometimes as light in her eyes. The end of her life, she says, is the one adventure she knows she will get right.

Yet she is one of the only people alive who has known my life. She is one of the very few human beings on the planet that I know actually loves me. And she is about to die. I got the phone-call from the care home today. It is going to be very, very soon.

There are a thousand ways to kneel and kiss the ground. Visiting her is one of them, even as it breaks me. Even as I cry every time I leave. Even as I still don’t know how to say goodbye.

to hell with me, just let it burn

I dreamed this morning that there was someone else in my bed with me. I woke up quietly, slipped to the foot of the bed, brushed my alarm off, and then crept around the room, getting dressed as silently as possible in the still, quiet dark. I dreamed the details of clothing, the smooth sound of carefully opened wooden drawers, the brief blindness of pulling a dress on over my head. I could feel that he was still asleep, though I knew if he was awake he would be watching and I liked that, too. I chose earrings he had made for me and over the knee high socks with a pattern of flowers that I had worn for our last anniversary. I sat at my desk and wrote him a little note to find later, “good luck with the promotion. i love you. x” then I left it by his keys. I knew he would get up later, read the note, smile, then bike to the library to work. I kissed him before I left, nose deep in the crown of his head. I wanted to crawl back in with him, but there was a focused satisfaction in padding around so quietly, getting ready for work and knowing he was still sweetly warm in my sheets.

When I woke for real, I felt like I had traveled through time and space. Same room, different universe, worse place.

It was a memory of a time with Jon that never was, a time-line where he didn’t commit suicide.

R.I.P. Fido. 2006 – 2012.

Fido

R.I.P. Fido. 2006 – 2012.

David went out on the porch this morning to feed Fido only to discover that he’d passed away sometime in the night, presumably of old age. He was a tremendously cute bunny and will be missed. I’ve taken his body and wrapped in a towel, so David can take down his cage and dissemble his hutch. Later today we will take the body to Animal Control to be cremated. If anyone would like to pay their respects, we are hosting Sunday Tea this week from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. (Note: David’s weapon of choice is whiskey.)

Required Reading: Neil Gaiman’s Tribute to Ray Bradbury

Today’s required reading is The Man Who Forgot Ray Bradbury, by Neil Gaiman, an incredible and moving excerpt from an upcoming Bradbury tribute anthology, Shadow Show: All-New Stories in Celebration of Ray Bradbury, which comes out July 10th. You can also hear him read it on Amanda’s SoundCloud account or read his blog posts on the matter here and here, which are also beautiful.

Ray Bradbury died on June 5th at the age of 91 as Venus was transiting the sun, mythic to the end. May his words reverberate through history forever.

Here Neil Gaiman explains the background of his perfect eulogy, originally written as a birthday present to the author (may we all be so lucky to receive such a gift):

I wanted to write about Ray Bradbury. I wanted to write about him in the way that he wrote about Poe in “Usher II” — a way that drove me to Poe.

I was going to read something in an intimate theatre space, very late at night, during the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. My wife, Amanda, and I were hosting a midnight show of songs and readings. I promised myself that I would finish it in time to read it to forty people seated on sofas and on cushions on the floor in a tiny, beautiful room that normally contained the Belt Up Theatre Company’s intimate plays.

Very well, it would be a monologue, if I was going to read it.

The inspiration came from forgetting a friend of mine. He died a decade ago. And I went to look in my head for his name, and it was gone. I knew everything else about him — the periodicals he had written for, his favourite brand of bourbon. I could have recited every conversation he and I had ever had, told you what we talked about. I could remember the names of the books he had written.

But his name was gone. And it scared me. I waited for his name to return, promised myself I wouldn’t Google it, would just wait and remember. But nothing came. It was as if there was a hole in the universe the size of my friend. I would walk home at night trying to think of his name, running through names in alphabetical order. “Al? No. Bob? No. Charles? Chris? Not them . . .”

And I thought, What if it were an author? What if it was everything he’d done? What if everyone else had forgotten him too?

I wrote the story by hand. I finished it five minutes before we had to leave the house to go to the theatre. I was a mass of nerves — I’d never read something to an audience straight out of the pen.

When I read it, I finished it with a recital of the whole alphabet.

Then I typed it out and sent it to Ray for his ninety-first birthday.

I was there at his seventieth birthday, in the Natural History Museum in London.

It was, like everything else about the man and his work, unforgettable.

— Neil Gaiman

a goodbye that came far too soon.

Tony & Jhayne w. Drew aka Schmootzi the Clod
The day we met Drew Keriakedes (aka Schmootzi The Clod) at Circus Contraption. ♥

Drew and Joseph Vito Albanese (aka Dexter Mantooth) and God’s Favourite Beefcake will be missed.

For those who haven’t heard the shocking news, Drew and Joe were killed at 11 o’clock this morning by a random gunman at Cafe Racer.

News of the crime and the murderer.

Titanium Sporkestra have opened up their rehearsal space for an impromptu vigil at 1700 East Marginal Way South, which is where I would be if I were in Seattle tonight.

The gunman killed another woman during his car-jacking escape and then later shot himself in the head when cornered by police, but did not successfully kill himself. (He is known to be mentally ill.) Kendall and Dustin were not present, but Len, who also works at Cafe Racer, is still in the hospital, potentially still in surgery, and the severity of his injuries are unknown. Drew and Joe’s families were not notified by police, but found out through their facebook pages, which was stunning to behold.

They were glorious, talented, and beautiful people, lions and lords of their community who I greatly respected and deeply admired, who always made me feel welcome and loved. My heart aches to lose them and I have spent my entire day glued to the news, watching the story unfold, unable to stop crying. They’ve taken part of the soul of Seattle with them.

“It’s been good to know ya.
The time has come for us to say goodbye.
Put on your mask and don your feather boa.
We’ll sing and dance until the end of time.”