gordonzola

Proving how much

anarqueso and I think alike about certain things, we discovered at work on Saturday that, independently, we had both volunteered to help set up El Rio for Heather MacAllister's memorial yesterday.*

I mentioned previously here that Heather and I weren't friends. We certainly weren't enemies though. Our paths crossed often but neither of us made an effort to hang out beyond that. I'm pretty sure I told a mutual friend that I thought she was hot once. Soon after, Heather came to the cheese counter and checked me out. That's the way I remember it at least. She might have just wanted cheese. Either way, we didn't spark. She soon fixated on a co-worker anyway.

I mention this because even though it was never my plan, examination of grief is one of the themes of this journal. Oddly, I feel closer to Heather in death . Partly because I can see how much she touched close friends of mine. Partly because her memorial was a lot how I would like mine to be someday. Hopefully a long time from now. I don't mean the things that people said, though there was an outpouring of love and respect that was overwhelming at times. I mean the format. Gathering at a public park, street procession, memorial at a bar.

My parents had few friends and my family is small and all on the East Coast except for us. I never went to a funeral until I was 17 or 18. It was for my coach, who I also worked for some summers doing manual labor. He was an old Scottish guy and his funeral was the first time besides that one AC/DC song that I heard bagpipes.

When I hear bagpipes playing "Amazing Grace" I cry. I seriously was pondering whether it was some kind of innate cultural memory** before I remembered that funeral. Following bagpipes through city streets is an act that demands respect. Residents came to their stoops and looked at their windows. No one mocked or heckled the march full of queer, mourning, fat radicals. Even when we crossed Mission St.*** people waited patiently for us to pass.

I've gone to one other funeral with a street march to a bar. A few years ago my co-worker's son committed suicide. She was an old hippie and all the other old hippies, no matter what they looked like 30 years later, came out to the event. Walking from the houseboats through the nearly empty industrial streets by the bay, it was a reaffirmation of community. There were people who had put on the events that made people flock to San Francisco in the '60s and people the mother had worked with for a month. It's fleeting, to be sure. The mourning reappears and buries the bits of joy one finds along with the pain at funerals. But marching in the street is a physical act of togetherness to look back upon. It's collective action that, to me, is more meaningful than prayer.

That Heather is being mourned by organized memorials in San Francisco, Portland, Boston and New York shows how many folks she touched. She was a symbol. An activist. A diva. A force of nature. Someone who died too young. A sister, lover, and/or friend for many people there too.

Since I mostly knew her from over the cheese counter and from being in groups waiting on her to put her fabulous outfit together so would could go wherever we were going, I felt uncomfortable even mentioning her death in my journal last week. I disabled comments and made sure people knew I wasn't claiming a share of the mourning. It seemed like the only respectable things to do.

But I realized at the memorial, or maybe re-realized because it is not a lesson that has sunk in but neither does it seem brand new, that it is ok to mourn people you don't know well, even people you could have been friends with but didn't, for whatever reasons. I knew Heather mostly as a symbol, an activist and as someone who meant a lot to people that I love. I appreciated her force-of-nature-ness even if, like most forces of nature, I was a little scared of getting too close.

Recently at work, we had a series of meetings to decide how to honor Cesar Chavez Day. I'm not saying the situations are identical, but it was a reminder that we have to honor our people, the ones that fight for the things we believe in. We have to remember them and talk about them. No one else will.

While Heather was sick a large group of folks took turns taking care of her, both in the Bay Area and in Portland. I was not one of them, something else that makes me hesitate to write about Heather. It was an amazing thing, truly an example of a community coming together to take care of someone without the resources to get through the fighting of , and eventually dying from, ovarian cancer. But no one has those resources on their own. (In fact,

anarqueso just wrote about this as I am typing this out.) Life-threatening illness is usually handled by family, but some folks don't have that option or feel closer to their friends or chosen family.

Heather's friends/chosen family did an amazing job through her entire illness. It was an incredible and inspirational thing to witness. There were too many folks at the memorial to mention all of them, but

amarama**** and

anarqueso you both made me laugh and cry. It's why I love you guys.

If anyone else out there has written a public entry about Heather or her memorials, please feel free to link below. Most of what I have read on LJ has been locked. The more voices that talk about what Heather meant to them the better

*I really think this obit means well despite some questionable word choices. At least "heavy" was a better choice than Gavin's Heather MacAllister Day Proclamation for the City of San Francisco that used "overweight" instead of "fat".
**If you knew all three of my real names, they would amaze you with their cumulative Scottishness.
***If you don't live in SF, you should know that Mission is one of the city's big main streets even if we were crossing at a relatively quiet point.
****who also read something from

charlottecooper so London was represented

Detroit Free Press Obituary

SF Chronicle article on yesterday's memorial
.