CELEBRATION

"a matter, as the saying goes, of life and death"

I’m still thinking about Barbara’s memorial a week ago, how it was so imbued with her. How the tables along one wall of the (Unitarian multi-use community space, if you please) chapel were covered in photo books covering decades of her life, including her cool wedding to Gary in Karma’s backyard and pictures of her and Gary with baby Sam, who couldn’t look more like a fifty/fifty split between the two of them. Also on the tables, the Madeleine L’Engle books she’d been reading in her last months, despite the difficulties after her stroke. Her knitting projects! Squishing Barb’s knitting projects was healing.

If you want a compelling memorial, MAKE FRIENDS WITH ACTORS. They know how to speak into a mic and they know how to tell a story. I felt it in my chest when Jarrett spoke about returning Barb’s library books, a moment when he felt reality sink in: she is actually gone, not going to return these books, not ever going to check out others. Barbara, not coming back. Death never not the most inscrutable thing: a loved one, alive then gone. Where? Gone.

I felt the loss and sadness, and yet I think I smiled more than I cried. Tom, Joi, and Barb R. read a scene from W;t. Yen Vi ran the mic around the room like Donahue (not my joke) to Barbara’s old coworkers who praised her devotion to the work, her precise editing skills, and to other actors who cried speaking about how welcome and wanted Barbara made them feel when they were new. The huge, drafty room glowed with love. And then after, Joi announced from the stage that there would be catered food in the next room soon, so I texted Alen bring Lola! and he parked in front of the building and handed our baby to me, wrapped in a knitted blanket and dressed in the outfit I’d requested (😇) with one addition of bright pink, yellow, and blue striped socks. She looked perfect and she was perfect.

When I had to cross the length of the chapel, cutting through the crowd with her on my hip, to retrieve my car keys, she clung to my shoulder, pressing her face into my neck. I felt anxiety creep up my neck—Alen was about to drive away and it would just be the two of us together in the crowded room. If she felt overwhelmed and hated it, we’d just have to leave, and that would be a shame, because everywhere I looked, I saw someone I hadn’t seen in years that I really wanted to hug and catch up with.

But guess what!!! Everywhere Lola looked, she saw a face radiating pure love back at her. So this is miss Lola! I know you from social media! Everyone calling her beautiful and sweet, caressing her cheeks as she grinned and then exclaiming about her two little teeth. She’s really into straight lounging, leaning fully back like she’s reclining in a beach chair, and she got so comfy so fast at the after-hours following Barbara’s funeral that she had her sherbet-colored sock feet kicked up in my lap as she babbled away at every new stranger. She didn’t recognize anyone there, but every face she saw was tender.

I saw a new side of you tonight, girl, I said to Lola on the drive home. From the driver's seat, I could only catch a sliver of her at a time in the rearview mirror. I knew she was exhausted. Alen had run some errands with her while I was at the memorial; she’d been to one of her favorite destinations (the grocery store), and now after all the socializing in the chapel…but she was still gabbing away, turning the looped stitches of her knitted cotton blanket over in her fingers. We study every facet of her personality as it emerges: a good sport when stuck at Costco getting my tire fixed, a careful examiner of the pop-up illustrations in a book, a self-aware comedian chuckling at her own bits before bedtime.

As I drove I recalled Pat speaking from the stage about how confident Barbara was, how fully herself in her overalls and shorn hair and Crocs, how she wasn’t (I’m paraphrasing here) always striving to reach some next, better version of herself. In saying so, she described so well a quality I knew in Barb but had only managed to describe as “cool” — unbothered by changing trends or, seemingly, self-doubt, not constantly trying to bludgeon a bad habit or annoying trait. I’m prone to thinking of my life as a project, my self as a tool to be refined.

Barbara on her wedding day (photo from FB)

At one point while offering Lola catered strawberries from a paper plate, I had mentioned to Joi how I wish I could have seen Barbara in W;t when she played the lead, a poetry professor dying of advanced cancer. It was a performance I’d heard about many times over the years from people who had been in the room. Joi closed her eyes and described seeing the end of the play, when the professor rises from the hospital bed and all her gowns fall away.

So she was completely naked, she said, and she moved into this incredible spotlight right in front of the audience, and she was just! She exhaled, reliving the moment. So powerful.

It wasn’t hard to imagine Barbara, embodied and totally present, commanding an audience’s attention by simply being. In many ways it’s an ideal image to leave behind, on one’s feet as life ends—death as a radiant beam of light.

Jarrett emailed me a copy of this poster and I’m adding it post-publishing because it is everything.

I pulled in the driveway to our red house. Alen and I gave the baby a bath and a warm bottle. He changed her and dressed her in pajamas and I turned on her white noise machine. Since Lola was born, my fears about dying have flared up again like an old injury. I am afraid of leaving her, am greedy for years and years with her. But what can you do? Her birth also awakened more of the confidence in me, the self-possessed nature Pat described in Barbara. As close to a fixed, true self as I have ever known. Both/and forever. Her birth and existence stripped away false notions I had of myself, put its own incredible spotlight on my being, like death in reverse.

I put my baby in her crib and I knew she was smiling in the dark. I felt, as I often do, the care and attention of everyone who has ever loved me in the room with her, too.

I told her I loved her and I would see her in the morning.

I am so glad I finally got around to reading Raven Leilani’s Death of the Party in n+1, and while grieving.

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I deleted Tiktok and Instagram last month for being predatory addictive apps run by bootlicking rich DORKS!!!!!!! still the addiction is so bad that at first I was downloading and deleting IG twice a day to make sure I didn’t miss anything important.

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I’m also really sick of paying simultaneously for every option I could ever want in terms of entertainment. Netflix had the absolute GALL to email me and say they’re going to start charging $18 a month and for what, and I am really asking. I dream of cancelling every streaming app subscription except Criterion. I dream of cancelling my Spotify and listening only to Berlant + Novak.