On Love, Luscious, and Loss: One Month Later

It has been a month since our Luscious died suddenly without warning, just a few days after we returned from a life changing trip to California. Like many of Luscious’ close friends, I have never lost someone this close to me before. Just a few weeks earlier I had watched from the outside as my community mourned the loss of one of its major backbones. I felt for Will’s closest friends but didn’t think too much about what it must have been like for them, and instead, because I was always terrified of death, fixating more on what it must have felt like for him to know he was dying. The closest I had come to mortality had been the death of my grandparents who were old and sick, which didn’t shake up my life in the same way.

This. This is different. While simultaneously I could have done with a guide book on grief, my emotions were purely text book. For the entire first week and into the second, the thought, “Luscious is dead!” colonized my brain, followed by the sounds of screams. Mine? Not mine? I wasn’t sure. I still am not. Since then I’ve been numb, angry, irritable, lethargic, and generally depressed. I’ve found it near impossible to pick myself up to do much. I am desperate for so many answers especially to questions I keep asking myself. Is this how I am supposed to be feeling? What am I supposed to be doing? Why don’t I want to do anything? My community of friends and especially my love have tried to soothe me, to remind me that everything feels hard right now and that it will pass but I have yet to see any signs of the fog of grief letting up. And I am scared, even though I know it’s only been a month. I miss Luscious terribly. When I think about her too much I feel like I’m being suffocated because of how utterly out of my control my ability to ever see or talk to her is.

When I got the life altering call that Luscious had died, I was still riding the high of our trip. Of seeing my favorite 87 year-old great aunt for the first time since I was fourteen, reconnecting with Nolose family, bonding in California! with my Toronto fat family. The day we were to return to Toronto Luscious joked around to my girlfriend via facebook that she had lost our passports and, sorry, but we weren’t coming home. We had an incredible time.

Joey’s living room where Luscious and I slept together for the three nights of the San Francisco leg of our trip will forever remain a time capsule for me. The two of us spent a lot of time alone the last few days, both in that room giggling, joking around, watching and reenacting Beyonce and GaGa videos, and on the streets of San Francisco exploring and talking about our futures. She really wanted to find a way to move to San Francisco, and looked into the Culinary Institute of America numerous times on Joey’s computer when we would be relaxing after days of sightseeing and exploring. I was nervous to go back to working at the Spoon soon after we got back, but excited that I would be working with Luscious again, especially so soon after nolose. What happens every time I return from that conference is that I want to be around my fellow fatties. Working at the Spoon meant that I could be around one of my favorites, every day. And even though there were times working at the café that I wanted to quit, that I just couldn’t take it anymore, the customers, the food prep, the hours, the wage, I was still excited to go back to it briefly if not to be with her.

My friendship with Luscious spanned over the last six years but really developed over the last three. I shared my first nolose experience with her and she was there to support me when it rocked my life, shook up my entire notion of community, and fat community in particular. My second nolose in Northampton, Luscious and I shared a car and did the drive there and back just the two of us. We talked the whole way there and back, and she told me many stories about her life that I didn’t know. We listened, laughed, and cried with one another grateful for each other, our friends, and our fat community.

Before I started working at the Spoon last September, Luscious and I didn’t hang out that much as she was often working sixty hour weeks but I still always knew she was my family. And no matter where she was working, whenever I would go visit her there she would come out of the kitchen and wrap me in one of her mama hugs and make sure that I would be fed. Any of her friends can attest, that if you went and visited Luscious at any of the restaurants she was working at, she would make anything you wanted, as much as you wanted, whether it was on the menu or not. She took care of us of her friends, of her community and I worry that we didn’t do the same for her. No one I know including my own parents ever gave me as many chances to succeed as Luscious did, hiring me at the café she was trying to build up when I literally couldn’t use a knife properly. I had never worked in food service but because she knew I needed a job, she brought me in. Many of our friends who worked with her at her various restaurants had similar experiences and some who have gone on to become chefs and manage restaurants all because they started in Mama’s kitchen,


Luscious was one of the most passionate, supportive, encouraging, loving people I have ever had the privilege of being close friends with. Anyone who knew her knew that she often wore a playful grin on her face, was always offering to feed, hug, and love us, and now that she is gone, many of us are distressed and dispirited by the void that is left. There are so many things we want to talk about but might not know how, so many questions we want answers to but know we may never get. I want to know what Luscious wants but can’t ask her. I want to know what Luscious is doing but can’t know. I want to understand more what I chose not to see or not to talk about with her both because I didn’t want to push, but also because I wasn’t confident in my capacity to take on those conversations with her, even though we spent so much time together; day and night actually, in California before she died.

I still think I could use that text book on grief. Besides that I have to keep reminding myself to let this healing process be an organic one and that there is no right or wrong way to grieve. I am going back to San Francisco with my girlfriend in August and am eager and afraid to revisit the last place I spent intimate time with my good friend. My late, good friend. It still shocks me when I concentrate too hard on the idea that Luscious is gone. I need community right now especially the fatties and especially other close friends of Luscious. We all need to hold on to each other tight, still. Because we just don’t know. We just don’t. Thank you to everyone who has checked up on me, who has offered to bring me food and other necessities, who have sent condolences, who have been there when all I want to do is talk about Luscious. Come What May.


Chelsey Lichtawoman
July 12, 2010