Cathy Seipp has been gone a year
Cathy Seipp has been gone a year
Originally uploaded by dynamist.
It’s one year ago today that Cathy Seipp died. It feels wrong ever to refer to her as “my friend” rather than “our friend,” because I cannot separate Cathy from the huge number of friends she brought me so generously. (I’m a guest in the home of one as I type this.)
Although Cathy had been sick for a couple of years when I met her, she was so full of life that her death really did come as something of a shock to me. I believed that she’d just carry on being ill, tired, and spirited forever.
I was very lucky to spend several days with Cathy a few weeks before she died. I cooked and baked for her, made her milkshakes, helped her in and out of her chair, refilled her hot water bottle, and tried not to drain what little energy she had with all our conversation. While it was heartbreaking that she needed help with all this and more, there was something very bonding in those rituals. Letting someone take care of you is as much an act of love as being the caretaker. It was a blessed week, and though I cried when I said goodbye that last night, I certainly did not think it would be the last time I would see her.
I’d intended to gather my favorite Cathy quotations into one blog post, and started trying to do so immediately after her death. I gave up after realizing that everything she wrote was pretty quote-worthy, and this work would probably never be done. But here’s what I had when I stopped, from the entry that has been sitting in draft for all that time.
I say don’t trust a religion if they haven’t gone beyond disliking dogs.
I grew up in conservative, practically all-white Los Alamitos, a hicksville suburb in Orange County…In high-school history class, the teacher mentioned that Jesus spoke Aramaic. This shocked one girl so much she started to cry, insisting tearfully that “Jesus spoke English!” If you explained you didn’t celebrate Christmas because you weren’t Christian, people often looked at you uncomprehendingly – as they did if you said you wanted to live somewhere else one day, or if you described a book they hadn’t heard of, which was practically any book.
So I spent my formative years in a constant state of irritation, which was good practice for my life today. Because here in Medialand, people often look at you uncomprehendingly if you explain that not everyone in America agrees with the received media wisdom about topics like affirmative action, abortion, and gun control – and that, furthermore, these people with different ideas are not necessarily evil bigots, even if some of them do go to church. The insular cluelessness of many of my colleagues actually irritates me more than the insular cluelessness of my uneducated old neighbors. Because journalists, unlike the descendents of Dust Bowl refugees, are supposed to be curious about – or at least aware of – other people with different points of view.
[…]
[On Maia’s schooling] I think it’s just as well to go to school with people who are different from you. I think that’s part of the problem with all these West-side liberal Jews. Everyone around them is exactly alike and they never meet anyone who is different…It makes me grateful for this Okie area I grew up in, even though I hated it then and wanted to get away. It teaches you that not everyone thinks the way you think. It’s a good thing to learn as a journalist that most people are not like the cultural elite in the newsroom. It’s so easy to shock journalists. If you have a different opinion, they’re shocked.
…Luke: “Was there ever time when people’s anger at you overwhelmed you and inhibited your writing?”
Cathy: “Never. If you are going to care about people getting mad, you should be a social worker, not a journalist.
…Luke: “What are the most common mistakes entertainment journalists make?”
Cathy: “Their biggest mistake is that they don’t know what they’re talking about.
Photo by Brian Micklethwait, taken December 2003 in London
Filed under: Life