I walk into the Plaza Jewish Memorial Chapel this afternoon, steeling myself for the premature funeral of one 23-year old Emma Bernstein—an incredibly creative, vibrant spirit I met only twice but whose work affected me deeply. Brilliant, impish, mischievously iconoclastic, Emma had been collaborating with writer Nona Willis-Aronowitz on a blog and book called GIRLdrive, for which I had been interviewed. Emma had taken my picture. On December 20, Emma took her life.

I look around the silent chapel and something feels wrong. I ask the attendant if I’m in the right place. “They all left a while ago,” he says. I’m three hours late.

My heart sinks. Nausea swells. An organized person, how could I have misread the time like that? How could I be so off? Anger. Then, selfish despair. I realize how much I had been counting on this funeral. When my friend Courtney first emailed me the news, I had turned numb. And numb I remained. I needed to witness the sadness in others in order to feel it myself. Mourning is best done in community, and sometimes I think this is why. Catharsis. Collective unloading. Something to help transform robotic shock into something more human. Even for someone I hardly knew.

I collect myself, turn on my heels, and walk back out onto Amsterdam Avenue, where thick snowflakes have begun to fall. It’s New Year’s Eve. Broadway is bussling with people living their lives. But today is the day a 23-year old I knew is being put in the ground. If I can’t mourn Emma properly, communally, I pledge to go home and write something for her instead. So Emma, this is for you.

Dear Emma:

I can’t pretend to understand why you ended your life, but I do understand the impulse. I think that most feeling, thinking beings who’ve experienced deep suffering, if we’re honest with ourselves, can feel at least a tinge of recognition, even if we don’t understand. I can relate to that feeling of wanting to escape, of thinking you will never feel differently than you do.  In March this year you wrote, “All inner and outer life finds itself eternally irresolvable.” You wrote, “embrace doom while doom embraces you.” But what I think you might have meant by that last one is something almost Buddhist, as you wrote “don’t just live for the moment, or in the moment, be the moment” in that same sentence too. You wrote, “It is in this beautiful misery of our condition that we must find the seeds of happiness.” Wise words. And yet, tragically, not always enough.

I can’t claim to know much about the misery in which you ultimately found yourself. But I do know something about the beauty. You were in the middle of a beautiful, and much-needed project—many, I am sure, but the one I refer to is the book you were creating with Nona. As someone who shares your interest in intergenerational dialogue among feminist thinkers, activists, artists, and on, I remain deeply moved by—or, more accurately, informed by—your work.  For a panel at the Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum in March you wrote:

“[D]ifferent generations of women artists need to choose open communications that commemorate without killing, but that recognize differences and the specificity of historical moments. An attitude adjustment is in order. Mentorship must come without passive aggression. Visible networks of friendly recognition must be initiated. There also needs to be a paradigm shift in our critical framework, so that younger women artists aren’t vilified by the hands that feed them. Objectification and glamour must be re-contextualized. The way we understand influence and imitation must be revised. This time the art world’s marketable revolution and glossy politics must be cracked open from the inside and out. Let feminism be an amorphous conceptual cloud that floats over women’s ideation and visual experience—and that brings us together instead of partitions us off from one another.”

Wise words, and true. You spoke there of mentoring, and I have to say, through your work you mentored, and will continue to mentor, those of us older than you.

And so, my friend who I barely had the chance to know, I mourn not only the loss of you but the loss of your future oeuvre—your photographs, your insights, your mentoring, your wisdom, your words. I refrain from drawing grand or political conclusions from your death. As Courtney rightly notes, there’s nothing romantic in it. It’s tragic. It is a horrible, awful loss. May you find peace where you are. And may your friends and family—Nona, my dear friend Susan Bernstein, your parents, your brother—may they eventually find peace and comfort too.

I will say Kaddish for you.

Love,
Deborah