Leijia Hanrahan
1987-2022
Leijia was a writer, translator, poet, and former right midfielder in New York City. She was a brilliant scholar and a champion of her beloved friends. She is sorely missed worldwide.
Like Songs About Airports – poetry by Leijia Hanrahan
Communism Won’t Save Us From Ourselves
The Poetry Field School Leijia Hanrahan Scholarship For Communist Women Smokers
Eulogy by Beck Levy, “For Leijia in Recognition of Her Desperation”
Hello my name is Beck and it is a horrible honor to speak before you today. I’d rather be talking with Leijia. I’d rather she have edited this. We read each other’s tangled thoughts and found threads of clarity. We edited each other’s diary entries, so that we could become more coherent to ourselves.
These past few years my conversations with Leijia were often about our health, the healthcare system. Our struggles to access quality medical care. And the processes by which we became experts on our own ailments, because no one paid to cared to. If I was greedier with your time, I would now read Bertolt Brecht’s poem “A Workers Speech to a Doctor.” You can do that on your own.
We are here because our beautiful girl is dead. But what you need to understand is that first she committed life. She attempted life over and over again, with the full force of her will, her skills, her creativity, cigarettes, and humor.
This will be new information to some of you: for years Leijia pursued and endured medical tests and treatment for a probably-neurological-spinal ailment. She never left with answers. She seldom left with care. Something was objectively wrong. It was not her imagination nor her mood nor dehydration nor lack of exercise. Her motor functions were off. She could no longer properly hear music. Her body had become hostile terrain. It was terrifying. Still she was her own dutiful steward. Appointment after useless insulting appointment, each visit documented by her in detail.
These last few nightmare days I reread some of my messages with Leijia. And I realized that she kept offering me help. When I was too sick to care for myself, she offered to fly to New Orleans, quarantine in a hotel, then come stay with and care for me. When I became too sick to stay in New Orleans, she offered to fly down so I wouldn’t have to drive away on my own. That is what my dear friend Leijia offered to me.
But I never accepted, not out of martyrdom or pride, but because I knew she was struggling too, and I didn’t want to add to her burden. If I just had accepted her help—I’m not saying it would have had any affect on the outcome we have here—but if I had accepted it, we would have had more time together. And what could be more important than time together? Leijia knew what things were important. She knew burdens were meant to be shared.
When someone attempts or completes suicide, the collective response is often to encourage others to ask for help if they are struggling. Leijia did have friends helping and loving her. But “help” as I’m using it here is, of course, material and collective. It has nothing to do with the hollow ritual of sharing hotlines. I am suggesting that when help is offered we must accept it as a matter of mutual, not individual, survival.
Leijia is survived by a formidable body of work. But this recommitment to actual mass health mutual aid in practice, that is the first lesson she’s taught me in her absence: we must not just offer but also accept help when it is offered to us, not as a bandaid, and not only in crisis; but to feed the kind of intimacy that animates interdependence. And to see what emerges from that! Not just in the streets but in the clinics. Not just as advocates for our friends but as adversaries to the system that seems them disposable. Not because we are intellectuals, or insurrectionaries, not even just because of compassion, but because, DEMONSTRABLY, there is no alternative. THIS LOSS is the alternative.
Leijia is the brightest spark. Leijia is the smartest person in this and every room. Leijia is loved, and she did know it. It wasn’t that. It really wasn’t that.
Leijia’s progressive mystery illness disabled her. It was a mystery for the same reason it was disabling: because no doctor had the interest or incentive to become her champion (or just competently manage her care). Her despair was socially manufactured and so was her disability. The medical apparatus denied Leijia her dignity, and it denied her agency… until. And she suffered, greatly… until.
Leijia was meticulous in life, and also in ending her life. Her end-of-life preparations were oriented toward minimizing her suffering and even (impossibly) ours. No credible argument can be made that this was an impulsive act by a mad woman. This was her response to systemic medical neglect, when all other options were exhausted. When she was exhausted.
Last week I was briefly hospitalized with chest pains. Leijia texted me:
“what’s the ER update
no pressure to text if it hurts too
much
just thinking about you and sending
lots of really intense love”
(And I replied: “I love you and I hate what we are
given instead of what we need”)
I didn’t know that when she texted me, the plan was already set, the necessary items ordered, the note written, the room booked. Yet she checked on me anyway: a lucid act of a loving woman actively engaged in a fight for dignity and life, all the way up to and past the end of her own.
I consider Leijia’s friendship a privilege to live up to.
I consider Leijia’s work now ours to continue.
I consider her death a murder to be avenged.
יהי זכרה מהפכה