Wendy Coburn: How has it been ten years?

June 15, 2015

How can it be ten years without you Wendy? I miss you still and always and am grateful that won’t change. So many days offer moments that evoke you vividly; evoke the ways you moved gracefully and awkwardly through this trying world seeing the details so many of us miss. Making me laugh.

I wrote these words about you then, for the many others who knew you differently, as we all did. Each of us with our version of your sharp, beautiful, easy and uneasy, hit the mark and miss the mark wacky self.

At times I feel almost desperate to know what you would make of all this nonsense, all this ransacking, all this virality – so much more to parse than when you left. I wish we could cry over it, rip it to shreds, recreate and float our own versions, survive it together.

I’ll just keep imagining you in.

My Words at the Memorial - June 2015

Wendy liked my hair off my face. She always said “You look beautiful”. For someone so deliberate and unhurried to words she was speedy to compliment. Wendy’s generosity was something many of us experienced.

She was always giving. A book, a plant, an opinion “you know what I think you should do?”, a steak, a bunch of arugula, something fantastic whose potential only she could spot in the garbage. And she never expected anything in return. Just love. And it wasn’t even expectation. It was hope. She had huge, painful hope that the world might reciprocate with love and justice.

Wendy and I were kind of opposites. To draw from the world of nature that she loved so much, and where she felt so at home, I’m like a rodent, easily spooked, frantically running around. Wendy is like tall grass, or a beautiful tree. (I can’t pick one, she loved so many and knew them all by name.) She moved instinctively and thoughtfully through weather, never seeming buffered by it, at least not until recently. Me, I’m perpetually buffered. But we worked - sharing a passion for ideas, an incessant need to discuss the idiocy around us, and laughter. She laughed long and with her whole body. She made others laugh.

Wendy loved life - gracefully and awkwardly. Yet she suffered it too. For her video, My Heart Divine, a response to the question If your heart were a profession, what would it be? she chose the ancient and hopeful science of the water diviner and paired it with the holy and mostly hopeless quest to find divine love.

Prescient somehow. It hurts to think about it. In many ways, Wendy’s soul, her pain, her optimism, were always on display, through her art, her gestures. She was both an enigma and an open book.

It was like Wendy was 9 years old and 90 at the same time. Wide-eyed, gleeful, wise, set in her ways. There was a timelessness to her. I could imagine Wendy banging dirty hands on overalls at the end of a long day of farm work in 1850, as easily as I can see her moderating a panel on the art of infiltration in 2014. Like a time traveler. She had her own pace and style, never needing to keep up with the tics and irrational jerkiness of fashion. And yet she never seemed out of place. Except, perhaps, to herself.

Wendy was the last of the drop-er-inners. Well, Wendy and my Dad. Any time of day, but mostly in the evening, when we’d have a tea or a dirty martini and talk. Wendy never rang once. Ding dong, ding, dong, ding dong. The kids would always yell, “It’s Wendy.” Sometimes I’d be in the middle of something and think, I don’t have time right now. But I’m so grateful for every drop in and I think I’ll always be waiting to hear that particular sound of the Wendy bell.

My 12 year old Ari talked to me so much this past week. He told me he thinks of Wendy whenever he sees an acorn, or a tall weed. He said it’s hard because he wants to think about all the happy times they’ve had, but now it makes him sad. He said he keeps thinking about the Yiddish word Eingeshpahrt – it means stubborn. Wendy heard my dad joking about it with Ari years ago. She never forgot it. Hey Eingeshphart she’d call out to him. Just remembering the word coming out of her kind-of-stubborn, not so Jewish mouth, makes me laugh.

Of course sometimes she’d say hilarious (ok, hilarious in retrospect) inappropriate things. She’d been blessed with a different set of filters and social cues than many of us.

I read many of my words to Wendy over the years. A few weeks ago I read her the piece I presented at a lymphoma patient conference in Vancouver at the end of May. “I think that’s my favorite,” she said. One suggestion. To my list of things that capture my experience of cancer, she suggested adding humility.

Humility is a perfect word to describe Wendy. With all the smart beauty she has produced in her life, with all the accolades, she was only full of herself in the most introspective, critical and ultimately inescapable ways.

I want to end with a funny little story Wendy told me when we first met, almost 20 years ago.

She was in a corner store in Vancouver and a slightly drunk man came up to her. With a big smile he said:

“You’re so cute, you look like a baby moose.” That was Wendy’s kind of compliment. And of course she totally looks like a baby moose.

I will see you in so many things around me, my friend. I miss you.

In memoriam: Wendy Coburn, 1963-2015 (NOW Toronto)