it mattered to me

art by Linda C. Hummer ( www.lchummer.com )

At 11:10 pm EST last Wednesday one of my most beloved mentors lost her long and arduous battle with cancer. The cancer consumed her body, but never her spirit.  It’s hard for me to believe that one of the most incredible women I have ever met has been gone from this world for an entire week.
Perhaps the most important lesson she taught me- and the one that I have taken and has inspired all of the work that I do now was that of the starfish. She would often tell her students a story about a man walking along the beach picking up starfish and throwing them one by one into the sea.  Partway along the beach he was stopped by another man who stopped him and asked, why are you doing this?  You’ll never save them all. The first man tossed another starfish into the tide before turning to the man and saying “it mattered to that one.”
I was one of her starfish, and the fact that she took the time, and energy to care about me completely altered my world.  Linda made college safe place for me; she made the women’s studies department of my undergraduate college safe for those of us for whom academics would never be our native tongue. She was the first queer person who talked explicitly about being a survivor of incest. She introduced me to all of my favorite writers, to storytelling as an art form, told me I was an artist and encouraged me to tell my story.

Over the past few years we haven’t been especially close, I graduated, her illness forced her into a much early retirement (the two events actually coincided), and then my partner and I moved cross country to NYC, but since last spring and thanks to the wonders of Facebook we connected again. As much as I find myself still in disbelief that this incredible woman is gone, I remember that her legacy isn’t. She taught me to value stories, the stories of survival that come from the unlikely storyteller.

I should be receiving the second round of proofs for the Kicked Out anthology in Friday’s mail and I’ll admit I’m more than a little heart broken to think that I’ll never be able to send a copy of that book to her. Without her I don’t know that I ever would have even dreamed of becoming an author, and so it makes me feel better that in this book, and in the rest of my work a tiny piece of her legacy lives on.  As I circulated the call for submissions for the anthology, and worked with contributors over the two years this book has been in production I’ve often found myself thinking of her. Every time I prepare to lead a writing workshop I think and often speak, about the way she encouraged me to teach my first class,  the prompts she used, and the care that radiated from her for everyone brave enough to put pen to page.

Linda,  it mattered to me.

Other posts by Sassafras

• Femme friends are the desserts of my world - July 26th, 2010
• Sunday Morning Cartoons! - July 25th, 2010
• July Femme Prompt - July 1st, 2010
• being out & visible - June 26th, 2010
• The beauty of femme - June 13th, 2010