Wendy Lea Writing

8/2/65 to 11/4/22

Deidre, you are irreplaceable. I miss you every day. Your life is an inspiration for me and will be for many.
Read Deidre’s poems at Poetry for the Natural World.

It’s very difficult to let go of the physical presence of my sister, comrade, all around pal, life long friend, Deidre, who I met through my sister Nancy when I was nine years old.

We grew up together and lived parallel lives that intertwined over the years. We lived in Oakland, St. Pete, Florida and the Boston Metropolitan area together. We both joined the Uhuru Solidarity Movement in 1992 and later partnered up with Uhuru guys and each had a girl and then a boy. 

The worst of imperialist diseases showed up in 2021 for her. Her family prolonged her life by rallying around her and accessing resources to extend her life. Deidre experienced pain and discomfort for over a year and a half. Even so, she lived fully and wholeheartedly. She did not waste time.

Deidre was a great mother, friend, comrade, naturalist, animal tracker, poet and cook. She was firecracker. She was real. She didn’t take shit. She did not let pancreatic cancer stop her from living.  Last spring I joined her with her son and his friend to camp on Angel Island. During the summer, she and her daughter visited the Black Power Blueprint at the headquarters of the Uhuru Movement in St. Louis, Missouri. She took her kids on camping trips up and down the coast. I also got to travel with her and another friend to visit her old stomping ground up in Occidental, CA where she’d worked on an organic farm back in 1992.

She was taking drawing, bookmaking and poetry classes before she died. She joined two committees of the Hands Off the Uhuru Movement after the brutal FBI attack and assassination attempt on the leadership, our Chairman Omali Yeshitela and his wife, Deputy Chair Ona Zene Yeshitela. (These attacks continue. Please read up and get involved.) She carried out committee work for the White Lies Shattered podcast and Uhuru tours.  In September we held a fundraiser for the Uhuru Wa Kulea African Women’s health center together with our friend Cara at my home.

I’m so grateful that I got to spend time with her. In the past year we did so many things. We frequently walked to her favorite sit spot in the Oak woodlands of Golden Gate Park. We watched Uhuru webinars together throughout the year. We did a dance ritual together. We visited exhibits at the de Young ~ Patrick Kelly and Alice Neel. We ate delicious soups outside on the patio at the museum cafe. We walked down to get her some walking shoes down near Fort Mason and one day we splurged and ate at the Greens restaurant. We visited the Botanical gardens where I got her a butterfly cloth and she got me a plant that’s now growing abundantly in my backyard. We walked with Tiffany to the Dahlia garden, that day when the sun was so bright. We got falafel, hummus and tabouleh (which she said made her feel smart when you ate it) and enjoyed it on the hill while watching the roller skaters. We also got to enjoy Zydeco at the Hardly Strictly Blues festival, the first act of the day. We hung out with Liam at Tiffany and Crystal’s by the fire and I learned about the film she and Tiffany and Merrik made in high school, Burn, Barbie Burn. Somewhere there must be a copy of that film. Just like somewhere on the Los Gatos soccer field there is a time capsule from the team that we buried way back when.

The Saturday before she left, she went with Ron and me to a sound healing concert in Marx Meadow in Golden Gate Park. We relaxed in our sleeping bags and enjoyed the beautiful sounds of a harp, singing bowls, gongs, ethereal vocals and flutes. Afterwards, we dropped her off and I went upstairs to pick up the extra food she made me, two containers of Persian chicken and a half a pomegranate.

Deidre you taught me so much about integrity, honesty, commitment, generosity, not holding back the truth. We navigated so much together including what it means to be a white person in solidarity with African and Indigenous freedom, being partners/wives, mothers, workers in systems we hated, writers.
You had such a beautiful style. I think of polka dots, yellows and oranges. I emulate you in the garden and on the trail communing with nature. You know so much about the natural world and could converse with my mom for hours about plants and animals. I am so glad you could be buried directly in the earth without toxic chemicals.

You are so much a part of me. Remembering you and our times together will last my whole lifetime.

Love,
Wendy

Today I’m feeling that life is a gentle teacher. These are words from Melody Beattie. She continues, “She will keep repeating the lesson until we learn. It is okay to become frustrated. Confused. Angry.  Sometimes it is okay to despair. Then, it is okay to walk away and allow the breakthrough to come. It shall.”

I am learning how to be a friendly companion to myself as the world shifts around me. In fact, if I realize that life is teaching me this lessons gently, repeatedly, I can be a more grateful and humble student. I can be more open to the lessons.

“Help me remember that frustration and confusion usually precede growth. If my situation is challenging me, it is because I’m learning something new, rising to a higher level of understanding. Help me be grateful, even in my frustration, that life is an exciting progression of lessons.”

(From The Language of Letting Go by Melody Beattie)

Unless you update them, they are just white boards with words on them.

This is the message coming through. This is pretty much it right now.

Just over a month ago, our kids left. The empty nest is exciting. So much to do. So much I want to do. So much we want to do. So many places to go. It’s exhilarating. A chance for travel, new ways to contribute, reimagine and reinvent. I am loving it. 

We were lonely, bored and bickered for about a week. Then we went camping at a music festival where he got to play drums. We went to sound healing concert in Grace Cathedral. I highly recommend it. 

Then we hunkered a little. Not wanting to go anywhere. Because it’s exciting, but it’s also a tender time, a time of readjustment and recalibration. As I predicted, I’ve been able to sort more quickly through old stories and scraps of journals and notes. But it feels like I’m sorting through the heavy parts of my past. And I’ve been letting go. And so has our fluffy orange cat. And that process has been hit or miss for him. He peed on a chair in the middle of the night, then took a crap right while we were Facetiming our son in Norway. 

And our daughter hadn’t settled into a proper place to live (without pet snakes roaming and breakfast bong hits) until just last week. So that was unsettling for us! She just put together her bed just this week for god sakes. So we weren’t sleeping easy.

And this month of October I’ve had such a strong desire to build my strength, like a new woman warrior, un-flummoxed by anything that comes her way, any emotion or personality.  And so I’ve been working out, not enough, but more. Something about doing a hardcore workout with a group of super fit women at a ballet barre in front of a mirror! And I’ve been owning my limitations, forgiving myself for my anxiety. I have almost debilitating social anxiety in certain situations. It’s a high cortisone type of fight or flight type of feeling. Much of that anxiety has to do with looking at our young people straight in the eyes, giving them all I’ve got and also taking responsibility for how my generation can do better to get engaged in a positive future.

I have also been listening to my own advice. Lift your heart up. Lighten up. Figure out how to change the cruel world without getting all tangled up in blue. And slowly, but surely, I’m coming through that tangled blue towards blue skies.