River
My dear friend River Abeje was born in Harlem, New York in 1958 and died at home in Berkeley, California of metastatic breast cancer in 2015 when she was fifty-eight. We developed a friendship out of the things we shared: breast cancer, being mothers, a passion for art and music, and an interest in politics and intellectual life.
River had dealt with a lot of loss in her life. Growing up in Harlem, at age three she lost her mother to cancer. Then her aunt, who adopted her, died of cancer when River was 18. I first encountered River when I saw her bringing her daughter Tembani on a tandem bike to the elementary school our daughters attended. About a year later, I noticed River’s long dreadlocks were shorn. I heard she had been diagnosed with advanced breast cancer and was going through a course of aggressive radiation and chemotherapy lasting months. One day she approached me on the school playground and said: “You’re an artist, aren’t you?” I nodded and she continued, “I understand that you also had breast cancer.“ I said yes, I had. She went on, “I like your joie de vivre, the bright colors you wear, and your joy and creativity. I want art and joy in my life. Can we have lunch so we can discuss how I can do that?” Days later, we were eating lunch and hatching a plan. In the five years that followed, River resigned her job as a lawyer working with female prisoners in order to dedicate herself to her daughter and to art: she created films, collages, and paintings that expressed her fury at the treatment of Blacks in the U.S., her grief at imminently leaving her adolescent daughter motherless, and her sexuality. She had a few shows of her fine art, which a group of friends and I organized, and I helped her complete a film about her life called Fired Up: Meteor which she asked that we show at her memorial service and which we did.
After River told me she wanted to engage more with the arts, we began collaborating on projects. I filmed a long interview with her as part of a six-person documentary about a range of folks in Berkeley who had faced significant adversity. She wrote, starred in, and wrote the rap song for an episode entitled “Una Drops Science,” part of Bad Muthaz, a web-based video series I created. As she became sicker, River was not able to be as physically active so we transitioned to creating work at home: mainly organizing her writings, home videos and photographs.
River said she liked my presence because I wasn’t anxious or pushy. Perhaps this was because I had been through cancer myself and had worked for a long time with a therapist and with meditation and yoga on my anxieties around dying. As the cancer began affecting River’s brain, I would sit with her, talk with her about her grief in leaving her daughter motherless, listen together to music she loved, massage her swollen legs, assist her with meals and with going to the bathroom, and sort through items with her in her kitchen and closets so as to leave less for her daughter to do.
After an incident where we found River collapsed on the floor, too weak to get up, a core group of friends and I began to help her plan for at-home hospice care, something she understandably had resisted as long as she could, not wanting to accept the idea that she was going to die. I was with her at the end in her home, holding her head and torso on my lap as her body cooled and friends grieved nearby, other friends comforted her daughter downstairs, and a hospice nurse came to pronounce her dead.
As I consider this painful but beautiful and rich period with River, I am grateful for the time spent together and what I hope I was able to provide. There were the practical matters of organizing care for her and helping her go through her things as she figured out what she no longer needed or wanted while setting aside clothing, jewelry, books, photos and other objects she wanted to leave for her daughter. But there were also the intangible things in the form of supporting her artistic endeavors, helping her make meaning of her life through writing, collaging, and filmmaking: part of her legacy for her daughter and other loved ones. This included the joyous music video she wrote and starred in, a video interview with her about her life from childhood to the present, and the collage-like film she created about her life philosophy. I think River simply wanted time, attention and love, which I was happy to give. I identified with her as a mother in middle age confronting death because I too had faced my mortality but for some reason had been given a second chance. I knew how illness can spring out of the blue and death can be just around the corner so I wanted to give her the understanding and empathy that I too would want. Isn’t that what most everybody wants?