Welcome back to the blog. It’s only fitting that my first post back from a long absence is about Kym.
When I first looked for evidence of our Facebook friendship, this is all I found.
But there had to be more than just a picture from BlogHer she’d asked me to send, a few years’ worth of wacky birthday greetings, a warning that my kid (and by extention, I) would be in her state for four years for college, and sorrow on the day I learned would be her last.
Of course, there was more. Hundreds (likely thousands) of conversations we had on our mutual friends’ pages. Five years’ worth of private FB messages, all the way back to 2015, though truth be told, it may have been further. 2015 was when I stopped scrolling, but those messages were where the real magic happened.
Where we talked about the special kind of crazy it took (that we both apparently possessed) to actually want to teach middle school. How damaged were our psyches, we’d wonder, to actually love being around kids that age? Where we bonded over each having a child who ended up at GT, though one of my great regrets will always be that we never managed to end up there on the same weekend to visit our kids. (Not that Atlanta could have handled it…)
Those messages were where we laughed about my helping a septuagenarian defense lawyer push out a book about his life’s work. A book for which we’d eventually hired her to create the website. And we’d hired her to create that website because…she’d created this one. My blog.
My writing home. It needed a reboot, so I asked on Facebook for designers to let me know if they were interested, and their rates. When she told me that, among her bazillion other talents, she did website design, there was no question in my mind she was the one. The process was so easy, and she created it just like she knew me, right down to the fountain pen with the squiggly line. And good lord, not only did that woman know me, she was always two (who am I kidding, ten) steps ahead of me.
Case in point: the blog design happened to occur right before a conference, and the day before I left, it dawned on me how awesome it would be if I had updated business cards with the new blog design. I messaged her, and she said, “Way ahead of you.” She’d already designed them, and all I had to do was have them printed and pick them up at the nearest Staples. So Kym. So very Kym.
In Fall 2019, Kym found out she had cancer. From the special group that formed around her and her incredible family: Frank, her four beautiful kiddos, Dani, Chanel, Faye(her mom, and by extension, ours,) too many friends to count, I learned even more about her genius and limitless capacity for love. Her Steely Dan fetish. Her surrogacy, carrying and birthing someone else’s child — a white one, no less, which apparently gave the nurses quite the shock. Her ninja alter ego. Just exactly how short she was and how far back the jokes about it ran.
This Facebook Community Kymmunity was initially called Hustle and Sway, as Ninja Kym did all she could to kick cancer’s ass. When she began to have trouble, the name was changed to Hustle and Pray. Through it all she kept us laughing and we did our damndest to keep her lifted up in laughter, too. Until the, I can’t say end, necessarily, because though she’s no longer breathing in her body, she continues to breathe life into the Kymmunity, which is still going strong. Jokes she would have loved are posted, news she would have absorbed, products she would have tried (Peeps-flavored Pepsi?!?), videos of her laughing — six months later, we are still posting and crying and laughing and loving on Frank and the kids and Faye and Dani and Chanel.
Kym is about as far from gone as a person who’s passed from this life to the next could be. That’s not to say her presence here on earth isn’t acutely, achingly missed by those who were gifted with it daily, for months, years, and lifetimes. I’ve never met a group of people, though, so dedicated to keeping Kym’s aura, love, priorities, and joys alive and around for the rest of us as this circle of family and friends. For that, I couldn’t be more grateful.
Patricia Ann Pedersen says
This post made me feel her aliveness, which clearly hasn’t faded. Thank you for writing and sharing it.
fkfkfk hate cancer.
Andrea Eisen says
So beautiful, my friend. So very beautiful.