In Memoriam: Onyxlynx

I woke up this morning to the news that my friend who posted here for many years as

onyxlynx , died last week.

She studiously kept her wallet name away from her journal name, so I'll continue to respect that. If you knew her by her wallet name, you'll likely recognize her here.

She was 68 years old, and her birthday was at the end of September. She is survived by her aging mother and her sister and brother-in-law. Her brother died in the 1990s, I think, and her father died in the early 2000s. She never failed to mark the anniversary of her father's death, using the Jewish word "yahrzeit." Though she converted to Catholicism sometime in the 2000s, after the collapse of her relationship with my partner and her father's death, she always identified somewhat as Jewish, and had a New Yorker's familiarity with Yiddish words and Jewish food and culture. Her Catholic faith was a source of joy and comfort to her.

She was stunningly beautiful; 6 feet tall, very slender, with dark brown skin. Close-cropped hair, beautiful when it was black and jaw-droppingly beautiful when it turned grey and highlighted the shape of her head. She was stunningly stylish: clothes (often ones she made herself) which fit her beautifully, which worked together. Bright colors. Big hats.

We knew each other for nearly 50 years. We shared a partner for about 15 of those years (1989-2004), which threw us into regular close proximity. I say we were friends, but she conceptualized the world, and relationships, and friendships, and communication very differently from the way I do, so I can never be confident what she would say. I do know that she liked me and trusted me, and that I liked and admired her very much. She lived with us for several weeks after she broke her elbow, sometime around 2000.

She was Caribbean-American, and found out as an adult that her lineage came in part from people who sailed to the Caribbean from Australia or New Zealand. Her father was a high-ranking Army officer, and "military brat" was an identity that was so important to her it was often the first interest group she would search for in a new venue. She was a photographer and a writer, often hampered by her own Internal Censor, who was such a major factor in her internal landscape that she often just called it "IC." She would talk about packaging her feelings and sending them to Fiji, and about trying to fool the IC by being oblique.

I always wanted to see her write more, share more, open up more. She had frequent intense long talks with strangers, on the bus, at the ballpark, wherever, but she was much less likely to get into conversations beyond the casual with people she knew. (I am told, and certainly believe, that she opened up more in groups where everyone was a person of color, but of course by definition I couldn't see that. ) In mixed-race groups, she mostly didn't want to talk about race or racial oppression. She said her father in particular brought her up believing he didn't want her and her siblings to "see the world through that lens." She certainly blogged and wrote about racial issues, usually in her characteristically indirect fashion. She would deflect personal conversation most of the time even when it wasn't (or didn't seem to me to be) about race. I've often called her one of the most oblique people I ever knew, and yet you could always see, just under the surface of the water, something glitteringly beautiful. Everything was glimpses, hints, adumbrations.

She loved baseball, opera, old cars, movies. Somewhere in the depths of my files is the treatment she wrote for "Pietro Rosa," a potential opera about Pete Rose and his baseball scandals, which is absolutely brilliant. She was paralyzingly afraid of dogs. She made gorgeous photo collages, with her own photos and very individual type design.

In recent years, though we lived in the same city, I saw her once every few months, either at a small gathering or when we would have lunch, or occasionally go to a baseball game together. I always enjoyed her company, and never stopped trying to sneak a peek into the areas just under the surface.

About two and a half weeks ago, she didn't acknowledge an upcoming gathering, and we commented that that was unlike her. I followed up with an email, but then I didn't follow up when she didn't respond. I could have done more.

About ten days after that, her Bible study group called the police when she didn't show up to a meeting.

I will miss her.