Looking To Be Alive
In Memoriam: Flo McCall
This last week of June, I was in Tahoe for a poetry conference — studying with poets I love, and generating work among a huge-hearted community, in the incomparable grandeur of the Sierras. The day I arrived, in the middle of our orientation, I missed a call from Jimmy. When I texted to ask if I could call back later, he replied with the message, “911.”
As he told me that Flo McCall had died, I felt what I imagine many of you have felt: total implosion. My heart clenched to a fist, I found it hard to speak or breathe. I started to cry. Flo was the most luminous human. It feels like a cliché to say that some people exude a brightness that suffuses the world around them, like a sun. But clichés become clichés for a reason. With Flo, it’s true. Flo radiated goodness, kindness, and a coolness — and a fierce beauty that was a light to bask in.
I loved being with Flo; and we were about to collaborate in exciting ways to amplify the work of CAMPFIRE. I cried a lot that week. The tears flowed because I knew how much I would miss my friend; and they flowed when I thought of those who love her most: her sisters, her kids, her partner Brian, whom I love like a brother and a father.
As I tried to absorb this heartache, I found myself returning to a grove of sequoias cathedralling a spine of granite they seemed to grow right out of. Wildflowers sprouted at their bases. I know that flora does not actually grown from rock. But the fact of so much beauty cohabitating felt like life blossoming in the midst of grief. Petals among stones, from stones: a symbi-Flo-sis, a Flo-wering, an ef-Flo-rescence.
At the conference, one of my teachers, Victoria, gave a talk on joy in poetry, of how joy blossoms from a sense of being held by — and holding — others, human and more than human, in the midst of pain. Healing takes a long time, if it ever really arrives. And as we carry this present heartache, we have to be that holding, and that being held, for one another. What I love about poetry is that it can give us a felt experience of emotions we can’t articulate. It names things for us; and in naming what we’re carrying, it can help us — especially in the abyss that grief is — feel a little less alone.
Passage by: Victoria Chang
Every leaf that falls
never stops falling. I once
thought that leaves were leaves.
Now I think they are feeling,
in search of a place—
someone’s hair, a park bench, a
finger. Isn’t that
like us, going from place to
place, looking to be alive?
We love you, Flo. Rest in peace, bright friend. Thank you for showing us what it looks like to truly be alive.
Love, Travis
