A Last Love Letter

Below is the eulogy I read to my friend Natalia on Saturday at her memorial in Stinson Beach. It was a beautiful day. Friends did yoga on the beach to the sound of the waves in the morning. We bought fresh flowers (and huge sunflowers) from an organic farm in Bolinas and filled the room with them. There was a roaring fire, dozens of stories, children, singing and a potluck. There were Soup people, Esalen people, Japan people, UNC people, yoga students, dance people. If only we had done it when she was still alive. This is the last I will write about her for awhile. I am going to stick to the Jewish custom. I will mourn her privately from now on--it is time to move on, and live, with her quietly singing in my heart.

This is our time to come together and share our memories. It is a time to piece together a composite, of this amazing woman we all knew. For me, this is a tremendous comfort. I have been waiting for and craving this day. I have never written a eulogy. I have been blessed to never attend the memorial of someone I loved this much, or someone who died so young. I do not know many of you, and yet I love you because Natalia did. But when I thought about who I was writing this for, who I was addressing this to, again and again I came back to Natalia. This is my love letter to my friend. This is my piece of her story. Nat, I hope you are listening. And Nat, feel free to edit—I know you always do.
I met Natalia 20 years to the month before she died. In many ways we grew up together. We met on a plane on the way to Japan. We were both on the JET program and we ended up sitting next to each other. If Nat were here she would be rolling her eyes, saying, Oh, Hilary, Not this story again! And yet, I feel like it says so much about who she is. So here, I tell it one last time. I had never been to Japan. For me this trip was pure adventure—a jump into the unknown. Natalia, on the other hand, had already lived in Japan, studied there, spoke fluent Japanese, and had had a serious Japanese boyfriend. I had read about three books on Japanese culture, including Shogun, one of my main sources. One of my books commented endlessly on the strange customs of these island people. The Japanese, it said, wrote in kanji—the Chinese letter system. Many words sound the same. So, if you asked what word someone meant, they would pull out their fingers like a pen and scribble the word on their palms, and you would look, as if you could see and say AHHHHH. It was so wacky I could not believe it was true. Japan really was going to be weird. But I got onto the plane. Within the first five minutes Natalia had gotten my life stories, what we had in common, WHO we had in common, where I went to school, and assessed my personality, my prospects and how far I would go in life. You could just feel her mind whizzing, newfound networks forming. I asked her something about Japan and lo and behold, she pulled her finger out like a pen and started writing kanji on her palm—JUST LIKE THE BOOK SAID!!! I was floored. She was the real thing.
Well, all of you who now Natalia know she was a traveler, an adventurer, an intellectual with a restless, curious mind, and a seeker. She was always building communities, inspiring others, and leading people off in directions they never thought they would go. For our little group in Western Japan, at least one of whom is here, she became our fearless leader. Every weekend we would meet in Kyoto, and she would lead us around. She always had an agenda, an adventure, a plan. She could speak Japanese and she loved to organize us. We followed her around like puppies, from temple to temple, bar to bar, bath to bath. Everywhere we went she made friends, American, English and Japanese. She would tease the Japanese, coming up with crazy nicknames that sometimes felt disrespectful, but they LOVED it! They loved her! She was their big, blonde, blue-eyed, fearless, bossy gaijin. Every town wanted one back in the eighties, and her town hit the jackpot! We were all paid to be clowns, to be larger than life, to be funny, strange, good natured. But that was just who Natalia was naturally.
Two weeks ago, on a trip to Big Sur I went on a hike and I tried to remember all the places I had been with Natalia. We never stopped going on adventures. We traveled to Kyoto, and went on crazy hikes. We traveled to a tiny island on the tip of Japan, Yakushima, and hiked through huge rainy forests and slept in lean-tos so packed with Japanese people that one night we had to sleep on our sides with our heads on our pots for pillows. She would just laugh. It was a great story! We traveled through Calcutta, Rajastahn, Varanasi. We traveled with a Kingfisher beer salesman in western India who ferried us around in an old beat-up 1940s British car with the unspoken promise that ONE of the three of us loose western women would sleep with him before the trip was over. He took us to famous Indian honeymoon spots and rowed the three of us around by moonlight like we were all his brides. We trekked through the desert on camels, slept under the stars and had goats milk in our tea for breakfast.
She and I drove across country, from Washington DC to Seattle. We climbed the grand tetons, camped out at a dude ranch (someone she knew, because she always knew someone) got giardia, saw a moose mama and her baby. And we kept having adventures. We hiked Sequoia, Yosemite, Mt. Tam. We got blisters together, had bike accidents together, cried together, laughed together and nursed each other through every break up and boyfriend and sexual encounter from 21-42.
Always we sang. She taught me songs and I taught her songs. We marched up and down mountains, singing Dona Nobis Pacem, the Indigo Girls, the Mamas and the Papas, and Sweet Honey and the Rock. Later she taught my boys songs, songs they still sing.
When her journey turned inward and metaphysical, she tried to take me on those trips, too. She tried to process with me, dance ecstatically with me, do yoga with me and help me find my power animal.
When she got sick I did what I could. I had a newborn and she had cancer, and she heard that breast milk boosted the immune system and helped fight the effects of chemo. So one summer vacation here in Stinson I would give her a milk martini every morning for breakfast. It was weird. But she claimed it made her feel better, and I would have done anything for her.
She was so ambitious. She was so idealistic. She was ambitious for herself and for anyone she respected. We all wanted to change the world, but she was angry, so angry at herself if she was not doing her absolute best, if she could not see that she was making a difference. She was angry at bosses who could have done more, but didn’t, at politicians who never did more, and most often at herself, for not doing more. I read some quote once that said a friend is the person who can hear the song in your heart, even when you yourself have forgotten the turne. For me, because I had known her for so long, she was grounding. She knew what my big dreams were, and chided me when I went off course, and cheerleaded for me when I got back on. She was always asking me to write, write write. I was a reporter, at the Los Angeles Times, and she would write to me from Larkspur, with stories of corruption, environmental destruction, bad people, and tell me to get on it. When I came to see her she would give me investigative projects to carry out for her here in Larkspur. She even toyed briefly with the idea of running for City Council, while she was sick, so she could bring things to the public’s attention. She used her yoga classes to trash George Bush. I wouldn’t have found it relaxing to be in her class, but I loved her for it.

But for me, the real reason Nat was my friend, that I really loved her, is that she was always up for anything. She was always ready to climb a mountain, jump in a hot tub, surf a wave, go out to see a band, eat a huge meal, sing, dance, laugh. She just loved life. She loved life more in her 42 years than most people do in twice as long. She was just alive. Whether she was angry, crying, lecturing, or laughing, she was IN it.

Last fall I came to visit her, and many of her friends were there to talk about her five wishes. How she wanted to be mourned, and memorialized. It was heavy. But I felt honored to be there. She was sick. Really sick. I stayed there that weekend with Melissa. At 9 p.m., after a day of talking about death, medical care, final wishes, when to pull the plug, she rose from her couch and announced she wanted to go see Hot Buttered Rum, her favorite band. So Melissa and I walked her down the boardwalk, bundled her up in scarves and hats, and drove her to Fairfax for beer and live music. She managed to score the best seat in the house, and as the band members came in she flirted and yelled out to them each by name. They all knew her, and she knew every one, and their story. She loved the boys. Especially cute, smart, politically active, musical boys. We stood in this jam-packed bar and rocked out. The set ended and Melissa and I were ready to go home. But not Nat. We stayed, standing and clapping and dancing til the place shut down, at 2 a.m.. That was just Nat.

All she ever really wanted was to be loved. Once in Japan we played this wacky metaphor game. One of the questions was: if this person were a piece of furniture, what would they be. I remember someone said, Nat would be an armchair. She was an armchair. She was big and comfortable and she just took you in and enveloped you. For some people it was overwhelming. I loved it.

I miss her loud belly-chortle and her passionate, enraged outbursts. I miss her tears. I miss her generous soul—she would do anything for a friend, and expected the same in return.

I have lost a friend, a sister, and part of my history. I have lost one of my fellow-travelers, and maybe you only get two or three in life. I have lost someone whose clothes I could wear, who I could call at any time, whose refrigerator was always open to me, and so was her heart.

She was a traveler, a seeker, an idealist, an eater, a musician, an armchair and a lover of natural beauty and young men. She loved celebrities and yoga and Oprah and the New Yorker. She loved life, she clung to it with every ounce of her being until her lungs collapsed, her liver gave out, and she literally had no strength left in her body. That is how much she wanted to live. She went out to dinner two nights before she died and had beer, raw oysters, fries, fried green tomatoes, a lobster roll, and wanted desert. She talked up people at the bar, and just carried her oxygen tank around in her backpack. She never complained.

I read this quote before to some of you, but to me this is what Natalia would say if she were here, just like Henry Miller did before her:
The best way to honor me is to live your own life to the full.

So as we grieve, I ask all of you to put your love of Natalia to something she would have loved. Let her live on in our actions. Do yoga or eat some alfalfa sprouts or kale. Sing to a child, or take a beautiful picture. Make a collage, get naked, soak in a hot tub, buy some recycled toilet paper. Get angry and get out the vote—for Obama of course. Live. Love. Celebrate.