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In Memoriam
What I can say about Shelley is that she was vivacious, beautiful, fun, flirtatious, often outrageous, that she had a great warmth about her, a bawdy sense of humor, and an inviting, quick laugh.
I was angry when she ended her life. I didn’t understand that her medical issues as a result of her 1981 car accident were worsening. What she feared most was being hospitalized and disempowered again.
A while after Shelley’s death, I saw her in a dream. She appeared in a gossamer sky-blue dress, so like the sensual Shelley we knew. She told me that leaving was right, that she had stayed longer than she should have.
The possibility of any consciousness beyond this life would have been completely contrary to Shelley’s views, but I like to believe that the dream image and her words defied that.
—Patricia MacInnes-Johnson
In Memoriam
My friendship with Shelley began while we were both students at San Diego State University, continued through our time together in the MFA program at the University of Montana, and culminated in California and New York with her untimely passing.
She was sexy, funny, intelligent, and proudly flamboyant to the point of being provocative, both in dress and attitude, certainly in her writing. One instructor in the MFA program used to refer to her “X-rated poems.”
After her move to West Hollywood and her terrible accident there, we all tried to support her as best we could, but who could really understand what she was suffering? She carried on, loyal and generous to her friends; she even treated me to a stay at The Pierre Hotel in Manhattan. It was a shock when I learned that she’d taken her life. She had such a vivid presence that it’s still difficult to fully comprehend her death.
Even so, her wisecracks and wisdom come back to me often. Maybe she’ll meet me at the proverbial gates of Heaven when my own time comes. Shelley herself would scoff at that. As she once said to me, “There’s as much chance of that happening as me opening up a 7-Eleven on Mars.”
The photo and poems here evince Shelley’s intensity as well as her vulnerability, her belief in spare, hard-hitting words. Some of the poems suggest a more tender, nostalgic side, such as her “Incantation,” addressed to a lost lover, gone but immortalized on the page.
—Daniel Shapiro
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