Steven Samuel Kushner (Kush)
Mourning His Death
and Celebrating His Life
Earlier writing is also included and noted as such.
All the art is old.
One of my best friends was found dead this morning. Or yesterday. I’m confused. My mind and days have turned non-linear.
Like seasons turn.
A heart attack. Kush was driving home when he had a heart attack. No, he never drove. Maybe Franky said he was in a car when the heart attack came.
Kush was coming home from bringing food to a friend. She had been laid up for years. Kush had taken care of her for a long time.
My friend collapsed on the street. Dead.
He had a phone number in his pocket. Someone called the number who called someone else … who called me.
When you’re older, your friends die. This is different. Kush was one of the most important people in my life. I don’t like many people. I love everyone, but I don’t like everyone. I like and adore Kush.
I am grateful for my students and other dear friends because I like and adore them.
Kush smelled like my father did.
I understand “mad with grief” because my sorrow has expanded without stopping, not into a loving universe, but as pain that has no bounds yet remains within; holding it is unbearable.
Kush was the person I would’ve asked to go past that horizon with me. Yeah, yeah, I know he’s still here.
A horizon too large. So I catalog his death, put it someplace, I don’t know where; or how. Now, I don’t hurt as much … but my gut is sick; maybe I’m repressing … which is part of grieving.
His death displaced my life.
I feel him soaring in wild places as always.
Kush, your sister is there, too.
He was the weirdest person I’ve known.
He was honest in his weirdness. Evasive as all get out, mind you. If I asked a personal question, his answer would start with “No.” That would muddy up everything he said afterwards, reducing it to gibberish.
But completely honest in weirdness.
I am grateful to have known his weirdness.
Someone asked how I put up with Kush. I didn’t understand. They explained, “He gets so weird when he smokes pot.” I explained, “When he smokes pot, he gets to where I live naturally.”
Remembering moments gentles the pain.
I am grateful for my wonderful friends. They are all weird and the stars in my sky.
So mote it be!
Celebrating his life celebrates mine because he celebrated mine.
Celebrating his life celebrates mine because he was central to it.
He never shamed me for my commercial success.
Best-selling author, NPR, ABC, blah, blah, blah, The New York Times, USA Today, Cosmopolitan magazine, blah, blah, blah, he understood it was all in service to my Gods.
My first interview was with NPR, about 1986. When it aired, Kush listened to it then explained I needed to put it in my résumé. “Oh, thanks for telling me.” What did I know, raised blue-collar?
Around that time, I avoided poetry communities. One had brutalized me in another city. Kush brought me to a party of poets. He dragged me over to someone and said, “You two need to meet. You’re both going to be famous someday.” Huh?
Kush celebrated his friends. Not once, but as an ongoing discipline of small significant acts and large brave ones.
I brought Kush to a party celebrating my newly acquired degree. Someone took me aside to ask, “This is Kush, this is the amazing person you talk about so much?”
For most of the party, Kush tucked himself in a corner and read a dictionary.
He had no social skills in the usual sense. In front of a classroom or on stage? He was charming, responsive, engaging, vivacious, and intellectually brilliant. Suddenly, he became adept at maneuvering the room’s mood and shaping it.
If you didn’t know him, and he seated himself beside you on a bus, you might sidle away because he’d study you from the side of his eyes, as if you might hit him. I remember boarding a bus, seeing him there, on guard, circled in on himself.
A photo from that party:
Hah, we were young, beautiful, proud. I look pleased with myself for finishing my degree. It had taken twenty years. I met Kush in the last years of it, and he supported me through it selflessly.
Looking at this picture today, I see that our features and expressions are similar, like family. What do you think?
Suppressing the pain did not work for long. Aside from my parents’ deaths, I’ve never been this torn apart by anyone’s passing.
When he’d come to an event I produced, I always scheduled a moment for him to be center stage. I had to. You could not stop Kush from singing. I love him for that.
Here’s another picture of the graduation party.
My arms around my friends make me think of the lighthearted old movies about outlaw Ma Barker and her gang. Kush inked the heart on the photo. If you knew him, you know he’d do something like that.
Excerpt from Essentials, 2002
Liturgy, lineage, lectures, and archives*, none of it matters, only acts of love, kindness, beauty, and magic. Wrap yourself in a cloud-shirt** from a friend. Be physically connected to him or her. Live in your truths. Live in your dreams. Live in your ideals. Live in your heart, your gentle heart, palm up.
* My poem’s idea that archives are worthless does not refer to Kush’s archives. They are important. I meant that many people care only about how words, archives, etc., define them, instead of how their actual lives do.
** Cloud-shirt: I was seriously ill. Kush mailed me a shirt. An enclosed note explained that it was a “cloud-shirt,” and wearing it would heal me. I felt loved and felt his presence.
Death makes me reflect on my life. What could I have done differently? What have I done right? What can I improve?
I was horrified that Kush died on the street alone.
But listen. I was planning to move to Italy and then changed my mind. A friend said, “I’m so relieved. We were all worried about you dying alone in a strange place.”
I responded, “I was looking forward to it. Dying alone, and then strangers find my body, and one of them wonders, “Who was this strange woman, living in an apartment filled with bizarre objects?”
I want to die alone so no one distracts me when I’m about to soar.
Work was all that mattered to Kush. Yes, he had lovers, friends, meals, but none of it mattered like work: Building a poetry archive, bringing food to friends, celebrating them, and more.
He married his life’s work; I understand because I married mine. And it had to be mine, what I developed instead someone else’s idea of Shamanism, art, or life. Dying in that marital bed might be physically alone, but I will be with the universe, just as I have joyfully been in my living days. Kush wasn’t alone as he fell in the street. He was with the universe and the knowledge that he had just brought food to a friend.
One of the main influences Kush had on me was his example at a turning point in my life. Wanting to be practical, I had almost decided to get “a real job.” Then I considered Steven Samuel Kushner, a weirdo who was a tenured professor. If he could make a viable place for himself in this world, then I could. I became a full-time, grassroots, professional Shaman. Professional Shamanism was verboten back then. But instead of choosing anyone else’s ideas of Shamanism and life, I chose to live mine.
Excerpts from Unicorn Horn, 2001.
I took my line breaks out. The poem was about Kush.
I am completely inconsiderate with him. He can cook and clean for himself, needs no advice, nor care, nor love, not from me that is. From others, surely; he has needs which, offering my best self, I cannot meet. I’ve tried with all my heart, and don’t fit the bill. I come to him with only need and hope (and adulation. …) But I’ve nothing to offer him nor a more needy man, for I am less woman than shaman.
… I can juggle stars but I have no heart to give a man in marriage. I’ve collected stone hearts for, is it over twenty years? A few moments my heart glows, but all in all, … my heart cares as little as, well, shamans ever do.
… Last night Kush read me poems. … I think of being there tonight, a hidden part of his altar, while he works. I might ask “If I do not talk, may I come over while you finish writing your book of poems?” I will selfishly ask Kush to be a rock in my sweeping mind-plain though I have apologized to him for my selfishness, and made pledges to eradicate it.
I want to sit and meditate while he works, I want to tend to myself, my special needs, silently while he writes. I want to bring him food.
Real talk. I can tell him, “I am a Faerie,” and that is that. … Kush need not compete, he is … as wounded and true a shaman as myself, and knows I see his condor eyes as clearly as the mother watches her child’s tears. And I am worthy of him only at my work, not in his arms, for he has no need of me there. But I liked the real-talk. … I chuckled and casually swapped jokes about eagle walking, no metaphor, walking in my shoes.
2005 note about Unicorn Horn: Poems represent moments in time. The risk? That someone forever holds me to a moment when I was distraught or beyond which I grew. But such moments are part of the spiritual journey, and we reveal them to each other, whatever the risk, to keep dialog alive, or else feel alone, because we never heard others speak of their own pains and meanderings.
I don’t usually mourn publicly. Grief makes me fragile, ridiculously easy to decimate. So, for example:
I was on a book tour when I learned that a friend died. Exhausted after the tour, I went camping. I hoped for a chance to break down and mourn finally. My friend who had passed had been a public figure. I mentioned their name. Someone on the camping trip, someone I didn’t know, started puffing themselves up like a rooster, by praising my friend.
My mind clouded by death and unable to comprehend this rooster’s insensitivity, I managed to ask, “Did you know him?”
They did not and continued speechifying. Grief-stricken, I could not find words to make them stop their grandiosity that hogged all the space, leaving me none to tend to my pain.
Another reason I don’t mourn publicly: I’ve been viciously excluded from mourning groups and otherwise attacked by people who used a public figure’s death to jockey for position. This overwhelmed me so I wouldn’t publicly mention my friend. But I will not choke on my words and feelings anymore.
Another reason I keep grief private: I become disoriented, so I fear I might articulate facts and feelings inaccurately. But now I don’t care.
My grief has been appropriated when I mourned publicly. One time, I posted a picture of myself with a dear friend who had passed. Someone cropped the photo, posting it without me in it. When someone hurts from a recent death, erasing them from the dearly departed’s history is cruel.
My words, stories, other efforts, and grief were wrung from sorrowing cells and years of loving someone. They are my life. Appropriating them is stealing life. Stolen life turns on the thief.
Feel free to ask permission for use. Truly! Thank you!
Friends of Kush surround me with love in my grief, supporting me with extraordinary kindness. I see the legacy of love that Kush left behind. It is obvious compared to past experiences. It is not ordinary. I think of someone whom I thought was a friend. Then they betrayed me, repeatedly. I cut off the relationship. When they died, survivors jockeying for position slandered me and otherwise carried on a legacy of hate.
Kush left a legacy of love.
One time, pain during a crisis overwhelmed me. Kush told me to get it together, it’s late, go get some sleep. That advise was love.
I want to leave a legacy of love. Kush, as I am writing this, tells me that it’s time to let go of my hate.
RIP darling.
Francesca De Grandis authored the best-selling classic, Be a Goddess!. Now she publishes less, to focus on oral tradition: Long-distance Shamanic classes and other services. Shamanism is the opposite of colonizer culture. Joy is political resistance. Choose joy. Express yourself. Serve community. Nickname: Outlaw Bunny.
