Lisa’s gone west

This morning, I learned that my friend Lisa died Monday. Lisa and I met over twenty years ago, when she came to work in the music department at Barnes & Noble for the holiday season. We hit it off almost immediately, and became good friends, spending much of our free time together. She is one of a small group of people I met before I knew my ex-husband, and so in many ways she felt like a permanent fixture in my life.

“When I was born, the doctor told my parents I’d be lucky to live to be twelve years old. Anything beyond that is borrowed time.”

Lisa had cystic fibrosis, a condition that is mostly known for causing heavy mucus production in the lungs, though it affects far more bodily systems than just the respiratory. She carried inhalers and did regular breathing treatments, and was always very open about the diagnosis, and that it likely meant a shortened lifespan. She was never shy about it, and she often (nearly always) got irritated when people said, “you sound sick.” Rolling her eyes, she’d snap, “yes, I am. It’s not contagious, it’s genetic.” She brooked no bullshit when it came to CF, and you always walked away from the conversation knowing a little more about it. Lisa’s passion, though, was music. She loved U2, and could tell you more facts about them than anyone. She would probably kill me for bringing it up, but she had a knack for Larry fanfiction, too, and wrote a few stories that taught me words I didn’t know could exist.

Not only was she passionate about other musicians, but she was, herself, a singer. Despite cystic fibrosis, which she pointed out should have made it impossible to sing, she was admitted to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign as a vocal performance major, one of a few dozen selected out of two thousand applicants to the program. I attended her senior recital, where she absolutely knocked it out of the park with several big-band jazz numbers including “When the Shark Bites” and “Bei Mir Bist du Schön.” She worked so hard in the months leading up to that recital to make sure her lungs were up to the challenge, and did something most people without CF would struggle to do. She graduated with a Bachelor of Music in 2005.

She relocated to Chicago in 2007, and as it was the early days of social media we drifted apart somewhat, but we kept in touch whenever we could. I visited her a couple of times, she visited me a couple of times, and we emailed back and forth, texted every now and then, and eventually kept up with one another on Facebook. She got married, completed a Master’s in Music Business, got divorced, and moved out to the East Coast, where she spent the last decade or so. We weren’t as close, but we still stayed updated on one another’s lives. Somewhere amid everything, she visited me in October 2012, and we went out for drinks at a downtown bar that night, which was the last time I got to see her in person.

One core of our bond was that I introduced Lisa to paganism. In many ways, it spoke to her for some of the same reasons it did me, and the balance of reverent and raucous that she brought to her practice helped me open up more, too. Lisa and I did some of our earliest rituals together, and celebrated a few Sabbats together when she still lived in Champaign-Urbana, and for years afterward when we talked, it was a feature of our conversations. As she was in all things, Lisa was frank about her spirituality, open in a way that was as refreshing as it often was bombastic. When Lisa and I practiced together, we often looked to Egyptian mythology for inspiration, and as a cat-lover she was very fond of Bast and Sekhmet. She spoke of things in very concrete terms that even the most devout often couch in mystery.

Even so, she loved symbolism, like a tattoo on her shoulder of a sun that said “U2 6:13” as a reference to “Heartland,” the thirteenth track of U2’s sixth album, Rattle and Hum, which began with the line “See the sunrise over her skin.” She had another tattoo, across her chest, that read “Invictus,” Latin for “unconquered,” which was true for Lisa in so many ways. The ancient Egyptians had important solar associations in their spirituality. The West was where the sun set, and so it was associated with death and the afterlife. The pyramids and other tombs were built on the west side of the Nile for this reason, at least according to the works of Joseph Campbell.

Lisa would have been forty-one years old next month, on the Solstice, a birthday she often reminded me that she shared with Prince William. For someone whose life expectancy at birth was twelve years, she did a damn good job of taking the devil by the horns, and she made the most of the time she had. Lisa’s gone west now, but she truly lived her life unconquered, and those of us who knew her were blessed by the experience. Her ex-husband, David, shared the song below, which Lisa recorded with her friend Anne, and nothing could tell you more about her approach to life, and the afterlife, than this. Be forewarned, like Lisa, this song is R-rated. (Lisa is the alto providing harmony on the track.)

Hail the traveler, and good night, my friend.

edit: My post originally stated Lisa died yesterday (Tuesday) but I have since learned she passed on Monday.