Remembering Christina Crosby, beloved friend
We have been filled with grief since the loss of our beloved friend Christina Crosby, writer, scholar, teacher, and friend. She passed away on January 5. Christina is survived by a wealth of loved ones, both her family and her family of friends, including everyone involved in BCRW. For her, these connections embodied the purpose for living.
On Wednesday, January 27, Katherine Q. Seelye offered a remembrance of Christina’s life and work in The New York Times, including among Christina’s many accomplishments, her memoir, A Body Undone: Living on After Great Pain, which offers a searing examination of existence after disabling injury–the life, work, and memory that continues.
In this work, she writes, “Chronic pain and grief over loss nonetheless remain as unavoidable facts of lives shaped by catastrophic accident, chronic and progressive illness, or genetic predisposition. Despite their strategic elision in disability studies or transcendence in happy stories in the popular press about trauma overcome, bodily pain and grief persist, to be accounted for as best one can. This book is my contribution to that record. I find that Emily Dickinson is right–in the wake of great pain, the pulse of life slows, and the interval between life-sustaining beats interminably extends. Life is suspended. In that interval, the difference between the one you once were and the one you have become must be addressed, the pain acknowledged, and the grief admitted. It can be a treacherous process, given all that might be lost.”
In 2015, we hosted a salon in honor of A Body Undone, with a reading from Christina, followed by a discussion with disability studies scholars Gayle Salamon and Leigh Gilmore, writers and memoirists Lisa Cohen, Maggie Nelson and Gayle Pemberton, and queer theorist Laura Grappo. You can watch the video here.
Watch an oral history of the Sojourner House, a women’s shelter for women facing intimate partner violence and one of the first of its kind in the country, with Christina Crosby, Tracy Fitzpatrick, Linda Kramer, and Cathy Lewis, moderated by Elizabeth Weed.