Wendy

When I feel myself going to a dark place, a place of sadness and despair it is often accompanied by feelings of depression and grief. It comes in waves. Those waves are often attached to dates. The birthdays or the date on which the person passed. Grief. Grief and loss are powerful. The pain of losing people in your life who leave this world unexpectedly is hard to process. It's really hard to process when you feel like the system we live in was the contributor to their deaths.
Tomorrow Wendy would have been 37 years old. I found myself this week looking up old articles about her. Reading the ones her family friends wrote trying to discredit her truths. Reading the articles about her death, the wiki page, her FB page and re reading a hilarious zine she made me for me when I left working at Street Health.
What struck me hard while thinking about Wendy this week was thinking about her son, Korin. I think Korin would be 16/17 now. Wendy loved her son.  She wanted him in her life and she stayed in his even when the adoptive parents begged her to tell her son she didn't want him, which she refused to do. She wanted him. Wendy suffered a great deal of grief and sadness over the loss of her son to the state.  I don't know where Korin is. But I think about him often. I think about what I would say to him about his mom. What stories I would tell him. Which ones I would include. I would tell him about all the things Wendy accomplished in what was really a short period of time. I would tell him about her sadness and her despair of not having him with her. I would tell him how funny she was and how fucking brilliant she was.
Today I was having a conversation with my girlfriends about sex work and safety. We talked about Wendy, about the Bad Date Coalition and the Sex Crimes Unit about her wanting to be a lawyer. I started reflecting on my own feelings of burn out and what draws us to the work and organizing we do. How we engage with it because we have compassion and understanding, our own living experiences. How the system wants people like Wendy to burn out and fade away. To not be able to struggle any more. Wendy was in emotional pain and crisis for a long time before she took her life. It could have been totally accidental that she died. We'll never know. Wendy's death out of so many people who have passed on that I have known, I find really hard to move on from. Maybe because there were so many players complicit in her death. Maybe because she left behind Korin and they were never reunited properly in to each others lives and don't have each other now.
Tomorrow Wendy would have been 37 years old. I wonder what she would have accomplished in the last few years.  I wonder what kind of lawyer she would have been. She was really smart and I think she would have been brilliant. I will always hold Wendy so deep in my heart. She had a complicated life and is missed so much by so many people.
Tomorrow Wendy would have been 37 years old. She probably would have lied and said she was 35.. maybe? And all we can do is hold people we have lost in the light and in our hearts. Remember their legacy. Hold on to our memories and keep moving forward. I miss Wendy amongst the number of other people I miss all the time. Today, this week, tomorrow I just miss her a great deal more.