Death comes for us all.
No one is getting out of here alive.
It is inevitable. How we live
between birth and death is what matters, not how it ends. Every death touches us all. Each life lost is a detriment to the entire
world. We are all human: gay, straight, cisgenered,
transgendered, Muslim, Christian, Pagan, Democrat, Republican, Black, White,
Yankee, and Southerner.
I’ve known love, and I’ve known loss. One thing I know for sure is we all return,
whether in animal or human form, or as a single drop of rain. We as beings, both human and otherwise, seek
this life, this existence. We choose
this life.
The dead tell me what they crave the most is being with the
living. Being with the ones they left
behind. They can do little more than
watch. All life that passes away returns
to us, if we are smart enough to see it.
It is a circle, ebbing and flowing without end, endlessly
repeating. It is dizzying, mesmerizing
and heart breaking all at once.
My thoughts have turned to death, because earlier this week
my beloved friend and spiritual soul sister LaTonia passed threw the veil. She was a beautiful, kind, loving woman who
never believed in limits or labels. I
pray she finds peace and rest on the other side. For the last 7 years she battled Leiomyosarcoma,
or smooth muscle cancer, but she was so much more then cancer. She was a constant fountain of giving and
creating. She was a talented artist in
what ever medium she chose.
Those of you following along know that I met Melinda in a
yarn meeting and that we were part of a group called Chicks-with-Sticks. I have been into fiber arts since I was 11
and re-learned to crochet at Barbara’s feet.
Oma had taught me when I was little, in fact it is part of my first
memory, but I forgot as I got older. I
have continued crocheting most of my life, learning to knit, weave, spin, sew,
and tat along the way. If it has a
needle involved I want to learn to do it.
I met LaTonia many years ago in a Chicks-with-Sticks
meeting. For many years we all coexisted
happily together. When Melinda and I
parted company (Billy the Exterminator) I
basically left the group. I did not want
to run the chance of seeing Melinda. I
went to one more meeting around Christmas to find out that the lady who ran
Chicks-with-Sticks, was leaving. Her
work had changed and she was tired of all of the drama that Melinda and I
brought to the group, all though she never put it like that. It was all implied. I was ashamed and embarrassed that I had
caused so much trouble, so I left and did not come back for many years.
A chance meeting with LaTonia one day at the Pines Road
Library brought it all back into perspective.
She threw her arms around me and just held me so tight. She said, “Where have you been? I’ve missed you!” I told her how bad I felt about breaking up
the group, and that I didn’t want to run back into Melinda. She said that there was a new group called
“Yarn Play.” They were meeting at the
same time, in the same place, with most of the same people, minus Melinda. She had not been around in some time. She invited me back. I told her I already had Druid on Saturday,
but I would try to see if I could balance two meetings at once.
I did. I came back
and it was like I never left. I joined
my sisters in stitching and bitching ever Saturday. When I stopped going to Druid after all the
problems I had with D&K (Goat Problems)
Yarn Play became as close to a coven as I had, for more than a year. Although almost every woman there was a
Christian, they were the women I went to with questions, my hopes, my joys, my
fears. They were my tribe of elders,
although many of them were my age or younger.
Since Juno and I patched things up and I went back to my Druid meetings,
I am back to balancing both meetings.
Yarn play in the mornings and Druid in the afternoons.
LaTonia’s health was never far from our minds, especially
towards the end. Once we all got settled
with our knitting or crochet projects, and if she was not there, we would ask
where she was and how she was fairing.
LaTonia I think often shared with us, and not with many others, at least
part of her struggle. She once told me
she stopped telling her extended family what was going on with her medically ‘cause
she could not handle the drama. I think
they often saw her as broken and fragile, when she was perfectly capable, she
just had cancer. What stories were
shared in Yarn Play I will not print here.
We keep each other’s confidences, and confessions.
LaTonia continued to create beautiful and inspiring pieces
of fiber art, whether in crochet or knit.
I don’t think she knew how to not create. She made blankets for the Linus Project, hats
for the cancer center, creating even when her hands shook. As I began to understand
that her time was growing short, I encouraged her to begin looking at her
projects still in progress, or “on the needle” as we say, and decide who should
finish them and what should happen to them.
Last Saturday I watched as friend bound off a blanket LaTonia had been
working on for about a year. I knew if
she had finally given up her projects, she was letting go. I knew it would not be long. She died the next day.
In November 2015, I began to write my first real novel,
which is at the moment called “The Treehouse.”
LaTonia’s beauty and artistic ability became the inspiration for one of
my main characters, who I named Anne.
Her beautiful son Gabe, became the inspiration for Anne’s son, and
namesake. I would call or message her
with questions I had, about growing up biracial, Gabe, and motherhood. We became even closer. I gave her all that I had written. One of the great joys of my life came at my
40th birthday, when she told me she liked what I had written and had
made a connection with Anne. It was the
greatest complement she could have ever given me, and I cried. As LaTonia began to slip from us, I felt as
if Anne was dying as well. Since her
death, it has taken me some weeks to get back to working on my book.
I had had a phone conversation with LaTonia about a week
before she passed away. She told me she
was not ready, that she wanted to stay.
She fought until the end striving to stay around for her son and her husband. I asked her one time if she knew how long she
had left to live. She said, “I don’t
want to know.” She believed having an
idea of the date of her death, would limit the quality of her life. Latonia was a woman who always beat the
odds. Most of those diagnosed with her
type of cancer live 3 years from time of diagnosis, 5 if you are lucky, she
lived 7. I believe because she attacked
the disease both physically, emotionally and spiritually.
She was a complex woman with a complicated history, just
like all of us are. Her smile, zest for
life, optimism, patience, smile, laugh, and encouragement to those around us
was infectious. Her’s was a life lived
fearlessly in love and compassion. We
are all the better for having known her.
Ilsa
