I almost posted this on Facebook yesterday, in remembrance, as a Happy Birthday gesture. Usually I post things there that I think everyone should see, since although my account is private, my friends respond most on Facebook. I want my friends to respond to Jodi; I want everyone to see her words.
"hey ladies...
i'm sorry it took so long to reply to this but it's been something i've been meaning to do for awhile. tonight i was also feeling nostalgic...stalking all you girls on myspace seeing what's been going on in your lives..and the lives of friends of the liwc... hopalong, the good good, jenny owen youngs, cara beth, chugga chugga... among others. i totally miss working with all you... and i think it's about time we all get together...possibly throw up an liwc pyramid sometime in the near future... but let's talk, i miss you girlies.
xo, jodi"
These are the last words I can find from her in my e-mail accounts. Sadly, they are from about eight months before she passed. It is safe to say that we spoke on the phone after that at some point, maybe we exchanged e-mails that I can't find about whether or not we'd make it to a potluck at Beth's. I've written about Jodi before, I conjured her energy and was enveloped in my own sadness while planning and carrying out the Big She-Bang 3 in her honor.
Jodi lives in many of our living rooms, in posters on the wall, photographs in albums, in memorial zines on our bookshelves. In a more real way, she has inspired us, she lives in our hearts and molds our decisions. Jodi's death tore me up so much. It helped me realize mortality tangibly, for the first time in my life, and it showed me that this invincibility that many of my friends had come to believe was our own was entirely false. That we could lose someone who was so bright, cheerful, insightful, and real, was an arrow through my heart. The kind of instance where all you can think is that everything is unfair in the world; why Jodi? Of course, the great and expected truth is that I learn(ed) as much from Jodi in her death as in her life.
Reading this e-mail from her made me nostalgic. So many of the women we worked with in the Long Island Womyn's Collective have dispersed to different states, different projects, different lives. Yet I remain in touch with many of them. It saddens me that I was a year behind Jodi--our lives' paths would not cross again. My first "big girl job" came a year after hers and Beth's, and as I transitioned from graduating college to living my own life, Jodi's passing would be a bridge. I never wanted this bridge, and I have done my best to honor her in her passing as I don't think I did enough in her life. If she were alive now we would work side by side, infusing our work with equal bits love and biting humor, so I carry her in all that I do just like I would have otherwise.
Us girlies miss you too, Jodi. Always.
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