I found out today that my dear friend Fredrica “Ricky” Gonzales passed away yesterday after surgery for a malignant pancreatic tumor.  While I mourn losing a friend, I am sure that she is now my champion from another place.  That woman had too much spirit to just pass away quietly.  I know she is making a ruckus in the heavens.  

Ricky and I used to talk for hours.  She was there for me through every wacky twist and turn of my separation and divorce, always quick with a supportive word.  She never tired of reminding me how proud she was of me, what a kick-ass mom she thought I was, and how that “a$$hole I was married to didn’t deserve me.”  

We traded war stories about how the men we loved had turned out to be dogs and bastards, and she would make me laugh so hard with her street-wise insults.  She’d channel some kind of angels and make up prayers for me on the spot, pure poetry issuing over the phone.  She’d bless me and I’d cry, touched by the warmth and wisdom of her words.  I wish I had written some of her gems down.  The details have left me for now, but the energy behind them remains.  In the end, we promised and reassured each other that one day, we’d find connections with partners who treated us right.

Ricky for me represented nurturing female energy, wounded healer, fighter, activist.  

Ricky and I came from different worlds.  Here I am, a white girl who has always lived a charmed, privileged life, for the most part.  She was a woman of color from the ‘hood, who lost a son to a bullet on the streets of DC.  She would take in many young African-American men and mother them, try to save them from the fate her son met.

We found common ground in our demons.  She fought the spectre of mental illness and had spent months in St. Elizabeths, drugged out of her mind, tortured and demeaned.  And our common ground was that we both came back fighting from the conditions that oppressed us.  We fought back with our words: we were both poets and writers and knew the healing power of writing through the darkness.  

She was a fighter but she was never able to win the fight for decent health care - which is part of the story behind her death.  

I want to bypass my grief and click into activism: to get mad, enraged, to fight for quality health care for all people - especially those diagnosed with mental illness, whose complaints are so often not taken seriously, dismissed as psychosomatic ramblings.  

But for tonight, I will allow myself simply to grieve her loss.  To remember her and smile.  To honor her fighting spirit and to know with certainty that death is not an end.  That there is no death.  

I am reminded of the beautiful Thich Nhat Hanh chant:

No coming, no going

No after, no before

I hold you close to me

I release you to be so free

Because you are in me, and I am in you

Because you are in me, and I am in you

I love you Ricky, and will miss you terribly here on earth.  

Yet tonight, I feel you beside me, closer than ever before.