Kathi Wolfe
I think—my aging brain grows foggy—it was the Romans who evinced tremendous concern about the best way to die. Or maybe not only the Romans, but they are the ones I remember—the Stoic idea of a good death, which they defined as “mental tranquility, a lack of complaining, and gratitude for the life we’ve been given,”* I bring this up because my dear friend Kathi Wolfe definitely had what I would call a good death—meaning she was very brave—and loving. She found out very abruptly that what she had thought was sciatica was actually metastatic bone cancer, and that she had a very limited time left. She called me almost daily during this period and usually with a joke or five. One regular joke she liked to make: “If I’d only known a great gig this dying thing is I would have started doing it twenty years ago.” Great gig because all her friends—those of us usually too busy—busy with what exactly, there’s the question—to make time were making time. We were all talking; we were all openly expressing our love, and this, Kathi said to me, had taught her (“a little late, but what can you do?) that to paraphrase the Beatles (as she did) “All you need is love,” or put another way love is what matters. At the same time—I don’t want to make all this sound too Pollyannaish—Kathi was scared. She said to me, “I keep trying to take it in, and it is terrible, the cancer has spread everywhere. I barely have a hip bone anymore, but now that I’m not in pain (she was getting high doses of morphine) I mostly have just this incredible feeling of unreality—like what it will be like, how can all this just go away?” Now that she is gone, the feeling of disbelief is mine.
We talked so much in those last weeks, and not really so much about her dying, but about the kinds of things we’d always talked about. Poetry. Films. Books we remembered and loved. Cocktails! One of her happiest moments that last month (which I had thought would go on much longer—I’d expected her, which seems foolish to me now, to live at least another year) was that she was reading—rather listening on audio tape—to “The Lunch Poems” by Frank O’Hara. How she loved those poems—quoting from them and/or just dropping them into conversation for as long as I’d known her—but this time she said was experiencing them with an intensity she had never before known as if Frank’s voice was actually inside her, his bones part of her aching bones.
“oh god it’s wonderful
to get out of bed
and drink too much coffee
and smoke too many cigarettes
and love you so much”
This affinity—Frank/Kathi—makes so much sense to me now that I go back and read and reread Kathi’s work. Like Frank’s, her poems are jaunty, witty, urban, fast moving, off-hand—deceptively simple to grasp and dead complicated underneath. They are reamed toe, as his were, with loss, the knowledge of time and its abrupt cutting off of love as well as the careening ability of the world to recover, for those moments when you open your eyes and out of the blue it’s spring again. Like him she had a deeply gossipy chatty, ever-in-the-know voice, and a sense of humor that just kept giving.
Kathi once told me a story about her good friend Penny, who like Kathi is visually impaired. Penny was walking with her guide dog, Willow, and a man in a suit (how do we know he was in a suit? We just know) stopped her and in his not-very-old young confident bourgeois voice asked her for directions to Dupont Circle, only he didn’t ask Penny, he asked Willow, and Penny felt compelled to tell him her dog didn’t speak English.
I don’t know how Kathi did it exactly, but she told me this story so wonderfully, with so many Hollywood in its heyday (think His Girl Friday) asides, that I’ve never been able to retell it to anyone without breaking into helpless hilarity a few lines in and totally mortifying myself in the process. It took me years to realize that it wasn’t even the story so much as Kathi’s telling of it—like a gift she had given me of being able to set aside, at least for a moment, every last trace of adult reserve and just laugh and laugh like a delighted child.
Kathi wrote a lot about childhood, about the movies, also about queer desire, love, also disability, also death. I can’t think of a big theme she didn’t deal with, but with the lightest of touches, with what I can only call, a rare charm.
Back when I lived in DC, Kathi and I used to meet up on Sundays a lot. We usually went to museums or the movies. Kathi loved that in both people tended to be confused by her and her cane. “Can’t you just FEEL them just staring,” she’d whisper, very loudly, as we walked past the paintings or down to get our seat up close to the big silver screen. “They are wondering what this weird dyke who can’t see is even doing here,” Then she would laugh, then she would suggest that after we should get a fancy cocktail and toast one another for being the badasses’ we were—“not that I’m actually a badass,” modest Kathi would always add immediately, though, of course, she was. Neither of us had a preferred drink, but we had many we liked to try. Old-fashioneds, gimlets, vodka and tonics for when we were feeling ordinary or in need of simple comfort, cosmos just in case they were as lovely as their name, which they weren’t. We drank a lot of Mai-Tais together, and we always asked for “the little paper umbrella please.” Once when we were at the Phillips Gallery, someone asked us if we were writers and took this picture of us together.
Kathi loved this picture.
Another thing we did, as friends, was email each other poems. Kathi was invariably apologetic about hers. “It’s really not much,” she’d write or “Perhaps it’s nothing?” but the poems she sent were never “not much” or “nothing,” they were always something, and mostly that something was brilliant. Six days before she died, Kathi said, “I’m going to ask you something that will probably make you mad, but please don’t say no,” and she told me she was asking me and our good friend Sarah Browning to be her literary executor. I had to Google what that meant and then I wasn’t mad, just scared. How would I live up to Kathi and her work? The last time we talked she also said, “I’m going to miss all that agonizing over words, really, I am. I’m going to miss Judy Garland and the ruby slippers and Philadelphia Story, and you. Everyone else, too.”
She wasn’t eating much by then and when I offered to send fancy chocolates by special delivery (I used to bring her chocolate often when we hung out; Kathi was a chocolate fan), she refused. “Wouldn’t mean much now,” she said, “but on the bright side, tasting in retrospect, in the imagination—it turns out it’s a real thing.” Whenever I remember that, I cry a little, and then feel compelled to raise a toast to my friend.
I still have to fight my sense of disbelief that Kathi is gone, but I know her poetry will live and live and live. I know, too, I will be toasting her, at least in my imagination, for as long as I can breathe. RIP Kathi. Miss you always.
*David Fideler, “What the Stoics Understood About Death and Can Teach Us,” LitHub, Dec. 16, 2021.
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About Sheila Black
Sheila Black is the author of five poetry collections, most recently Radium Dream from Salmon Poetry, Ireland. Poems and essays have appeared in Poetry, Ploughshares, The Nation, The New York Times, and elsewhere. She is a co-editor of Beauty is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability. Honors include a 2012 Witter Bynner Fellowship from the Library of Congress for which she was selected by Philip Levine. She lives in San Antonio, TX and Tempe, AZ where she is assistant director of the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing at Arizona State University (ASU).