I can’t help feeling it’s ironic that Marissa and I settled on “Time on Our Side” as the theme for this issue, since in the meantime, sadness has overtaken EAP like a blanket of fog. Too much death.
Nothing we can do can change that. To think we can do away with death is to wish life away, too. You can’t have life without death.
It’s inevitable. Suffering is inevitable. This means mourning is necessary, a part of being human. A demand made to us by life. The old dies. The new appears. Alas, though, in this human world we live in, when loved ones die, they are gone. New relationships appear, new ways of being for those who mourn, but that doesn’t make the loss any less painful. It doesn’t make the grief go away. The loss, the grief—those things just have to be lived through.
Mourning and grief are much on my mind, since we’ve lost two different contributors to EAP in the last few months. Hardest for me was the loss of Tamra Lucid, who with her husband, Ronnie Pontiac, has been a longtime contributor to EAP. Even though I never physically met Tamra, she was always as present to me, maybe more present than people I see all the time. It’s not the body or the mind we react to in meeting others, whether we know it or not. It’s the soul. You don’t need to meet someone in person to love their soul. That kind of love happens all the time. So it was with me with Tamra.
She died unexpectedly, no illness, no warning, and that kind of death is a worse shock to loved ones. Ronnie, her husband of forty-six years, is understandably reeling. Even I was so stunned, I could hardly think of words to say to him, or of words to say here. It was like getting hit in the stomach, losing Tamra. That’s the best way I can put it.
Oddly enough, I first knew both Tamra and Ronnie through Brian Griffith, who was one of the first authors EAP published, and who has become a warm personal friend—again without my ever having met him. He was not just writing for EAP then, but also for an online magazine called “Newtopia” that Tamra and Ronnie ran. It didn’t take long for me to see we were all thinking along the same lines, and working for the same goals. Brian brought another likeminded soul onboard EAP, his brother, Dave Griffith, and Dave, too, has died recently. Brian writes a eulogy for him here.
Tamra had already written a piece we agreed was perfect for this issue, along with some photos she’d taken to go with it. That piece is here. It reminds me how I coaxed her along to certain themes to start with, cheered the idea of her taking as a special topic a Los Angeles that not many people know. Her first, very successful, book was about that, and I was proud to be one of the first to read it, as well as to publish early excerpts on EAP: The Magazine. Since then, she and Ronnie have written multiple, equally successful, books, separately and together, also with early chapters excerpted gladly by EAP. Their last one was finished right before she died. An early version of a chapter, by Ronnie, was can be found here. I was a huge cheerleader for that book, on the sidelines. We’ll have more to say about it when it finally comes out.
Tamra wanted the world to be a better place, and she spoke up, in every medium she could, for anyone who couldn’t speak up for themselves. She did this in writing, in music, in filmmaking, always busy, as if there wasn’t enough time, as if Time wasn’t on our side. But have a look at Bruce E.R. Thompson’s piece on the nature of time in this issue, where he argues that Time happens all at once, the way we see it passing is just a function of our perception. It’s a comforting thought. Bruce, as well as being a philosopher by trade, has been forced to become one by suffering in his own life, by learning what mourning can mean. He doesn’t speak of that here, but it’s behind everything he writes. So his words have extra force for me. Cliff Beck’s poem, Of times and tides, is a comfort too, as poetry so often should be and is.
Then there’s the letter I got from sometimes EAP contributor Giles O’Dell, which with his permission I’ve reprinted here. Giles is one of the hardest working graphic artists in rock and roll, and Mike Madrid and I have greatly enjoyed his series Zoonbats. He sent this letter with the latest issue (and a picture from that issue is our magazine’s picture as well), talking about his experiences after Hurricane Helene, in Asheville, and his wistful hopes that what had been gained then not be lost.
That’s what we all hope, through every kind of loss, disaster, and death. That whatever is gained is not lost. Nothing that’s created can be destroyed. That’s transformation, painful as it is, shining on the edges of the fog of mourning. Eventually the fog burns away, and there’s a new landscape underneath. Whether that’s for good or for ill, well, I suppose that’s up to us who have to live in it.
Welcome back.
Oh, and I cannot forget another bit of light around the edges of the fog, which is when congratulations are in order for another great sometime contributor to EAP, Terese Svoboda, on the publication of her latest memoir, Hitler and My Mother-in-law. Have a look at praise for it and her from places like Publisher’s Weekly and the New York Times. I’m looking forward to my own copy, and you can get yours, too, here.