I’m a Teacher. I’m About to Quit.

The MAGA students are getting worse. They’ve always complained about safe spaces. The classroom is supposed to be one. They don’t like that.

They’ve turned classrooms into one of the most dangerous places in the world. Imagine a bunch of people with different views and experiences, all randomly thrown together in a room and asked to talk to each other while learning how to debate topics like abortion and global warming. Now let some of those students have guns, and add a deadly virus.I’ve got a handful of straight up MAGA assholes in my classes this year. They’re anti-masking, anti-vaxxing conspiracy theorists.

How bad are they?

Kathy Shaidle was the most honest person I’ve ever known. If she was around to be honest with us today I’m sure she’d say that she really didn’t want to see us here, almost as much as she’d say that she’d really rather not be here, herself.

Kathy was never afraid of candour or controversy or hurt feelings. She was tough and, at a time when the word is thrown around far too often, truly brave. Kathy set a standard for public behaviour and personal loyalty that we, the people she left behind, are forced to live up to in her absence.

Like many of us, I first met Kathy online, but I was lucky enough to transfer that friendship to the real world, where I came to rely on Kathy for her unerring ability to cut through clouds of error and confusion, starting with her own. Kathy had no patience for Pontius Pilate’s “What is truth?” She knew the truth was out there, and that even when it was hard to find, there was no excuse to settle for flattering lies.

Kathy made enemies, but what she talked about less was how she made friends, often at a distance of hundreds or even thousands of miles. That was her superpower – with little more than her words she let you know who you were dealing with, and her honesty and heedless candour became a magnet that pulled us into her orbit.

Once there you knew you’d been chosen as part of an exclusive club – the people Kathy could tolerate. In some ways I think she preferred online friendships to real world ones; as a basically shy person, she had no pressure to make her tiny frame mutate and grow to fill out the fierceness she projected with her words.

This was something we talked about all the time, when she still worked in an actual office, or when she was called upon to embody her opinions on television, to put a face to the voice. This was when things could go very wrong – when the honesty wasn’t appreciated, or when the person asking the questions for the camera got much more of an answer than they expected. We’d go over the experience and share a running joke that went on for years: That’s what you get for leaving the house.

Leaving the house – embodying her opinions in person, to audiences of strangers – was part of the price Kathy paid for weaponizing her outspokenness. I’m not sure she ever thought it was worth it. And it might be a bit late to be saying this but Kathy – nobody thought you looked like Hilary Clinton.

Once you were part of Kathy’s circle of friends you’d find yourself receiving the gift of her immense sympathy, support and generosity – traits she did nothing to advertise or celebrate. Raising a family and undergoing an apparently ongoing career crisis, my wife and I were beneficiaries of Kathy and Arnie’s generosity so often – gifts and support that would arrive at crucial, unexpected times.

Kathy’s voice was such a strong, indelible thing that even off a screen at the end of a long transmission it commanded your attention with its force, like when she told you that the Who was better than whatever crappy band you liked, or explained the angry, vulnerable depths of a Bette Davis performance. (I’ve spent the summer writing Kathy’s old movie column, and every time I’ve contemplated a Bette Davis movie I’ve had to avert my eyes and move on, so thoroughly did Kathy stake out a claim on that actress and her persona.)

I hear her voice whenever some hot bit of news bursts out of the feed like a hissing lava rock. I can hear Kathy telling us to hold back and wait before we say anything out loud, because the truth of the story – if there’s any in it at all – will only reveal itself after a day or more, and that our eagerness to let it confirm our fantasies and prejudices will only end in embarrassment.

It’s been eight months now without that voice, and if I’m honest it’s been as horrible as we imagined. And it would have been even if every day wasn’t such a target-rich environment, demanding Kathy’s excoriating response, an Agent Orange of mockery and dismay, stripping the landscape bare and exposing bad actors and their dissembling for what it is.

As someone afflicted by an illness early in life, Kathy thought – and wrote – about death, a lot. My favorite meditation on her mortality was in God Rides A Yamaha, where she wonders if Heaven was – like her parents told her during a thunderstorm – “God’s bowling alley” and “if so, do we have to rent shoes?”

She recalls how people who’ve had near-death experiences talk about traveling down a tunnel towards a light, where they’re greeted by deceased friends and relatives. Worried that she doesn’t have enough of either on the other side, and by her own stubbornness, she imagines that she’d need someone really persuasive to meet her – someone like Robert F. Kennedy, one of her earliest heartthrobs.

It’s here that Kathy said she planned to cheat death, and that the first thing she’d do when she was met by RFK was to “scream my head clean off.”

“Screaming in Heaven will, I believe, constitute a big enough breach of celestial etiquette to get me kicked out of there faster than you can say ‘Elizabeth Kubler-Ross.’”

“In this way, I could bounce back and forth between life and death forever, but I really don’t want to. God and I are still ironing out our ‘heaven issues,’ but I have extracted a promise that there’ll be a not-too-smelly pair of size fives waiting at the shoe rental counter when I get there.”

I’ve been waiting to hear Kathy’s scream for eight months now, and I intend to keep waiting, since the alternative is silence, and that’s unbearable. I miss my friend, and I miss her voice, and the world without it is so terribly diminished.

I asked Kathy’s old friend and fellow poet Lynn Crosbie to share some of her memories of our friend, and I thought I’d end with what she wrote:

Kathy and I came up together as poets. We were competitive, very much so. She would come speak to my U of T students many years later—we were studying her brilliant collection, Lobotomy Magnificat—and tell a story about publishing her first poems in a magazine only to find me on the cover. “The cover!” she said, loudly: they laughed, Kathy was so very funny and a great story-teller, and I wondered at her ability to make our then-serious feud so light, as she went on to praise me. And make me a real poet to students utterly underwhelmed by me. How did she know I needed this?

Like the time she told me, out of nowhere, some time after, “Stop writing for free.” How did she know that?! It was a benediction. The next time a well-to-do editor met me for coffee, holding stacks of moist magazines he wanted me to review FOR FREE, I said no. He was quite angry, but rock star poet girls are to be heeded.

In an interview in our early days, she said she’d only ever repeat high school if she could “Look like Debbie Harry and carry a gun.”

She looked like a cross between Harry and Tanya Hearst: blonde and dangerous, yet somehow, terribly sweet.

She believed in God when no one cool would admit such a thing, and she believed a number of startling, absolutely hilariously phrased, things that caused her a great deal of trouble.

At least in the art world she had left behind for a while.

I praised her collection of essays, Confessions of a Failed Slut and she thanked me, so much. “But do be warned,” she said. “Publicly supporting me can invite vicious blowback. If you need to retreat, I’ll understand.”

Blowback. Meh. Kathy’s _titles alone_ merited prizes, including her first book, Gas Stations of the Cross.

She once posted pieces she and I had written, very different takes, both aggressive! And said that look, disagreements don’t matter, not if there is love and respect.

She never failed to check up on me, especially over these last ten, very rough years. She prayed for my sick father, helped me look for work and always made me smile.
I asked her to send me new poems.

These are about Mia Farrow, whom I had always dismissed as creepy, but Kathy’s immense heart led her to Farrow’s lonely childhood, where she lay, interminably, sick with polio.

But I was also obsessed with Farrow. I like creepy and read her memoir as camp.
Kathy saw what only pure eyes can see. The frightened girl in her.
The frightened girl in me, so often ousted and muttered about because I’m mean and hideous.

Kathy was a girlish girl in many ways, with an ancient crush on Mick Jones who cried whenever she heard Maggie Helwig’s poem about the Montreal Massacre that names each young woman.

A political firebrand, of course.
A staunch Catholic, who could make fun of her Church too, lightly.
An incisive editor and essayist.
A dreamy, inspired film critic.

And a beautiful lyrical poet, whose love for women unloved in this world always rang more true than mine, and I’m sorry for our long ago feud, my “funny duchess,” as Anne Sexton called Sylvia Plath.

And I’m glad we moved forward.

Your life always impressed and often humbled me.

I wish I could have helped when you were sick. The last time we spoke was on LinkedIn.

I asked and you didn’t answer.
I left the site you detested.
I imagine you wanted to spend all your time with the husband who put stars in your eyes.

Kathy was the friend you could talk to for hours about art and culture, who would turn around and help you move a horrible accumulation of junk from one crummy apartment to the next.

Who was scary and tough, just like a woman.

She never broke, but that little girl was there somewhere.

Asking to be loved, acting like it didn’t matter.

I loved her. I will always love her, and the poems and stories and electrical words she leaves behind.

In each one, the woman transcends her tragic conditions, including mortality.
As Kathy surely has: I feel her, as a rare ally: I feel her hand glance my shoulder.
Get on with it, she says, not unkindly.

I look back on this poem, written when you were just a kid—

A SUMMER THUNDERSTORM CONSIDERED AS THE ASSASSINATION OF JOHN FITZGERALD KENNEDY
Kathy Shaidle
From: Lobotomy Magnificat. Oberon Press, 1997.
after Ballard

Skin’s prayed wet rosaries all day.
Finally thunder turns the corner—a memory trigger.

Can’t close the window in time.
Trees wave by the roadside.
A motorcade of clouds.
Then the quality of mercy backfires.
A speeding car blasts a puddle skyward.

The predicted drop in temperature.

Sidewalk and rain—concrete veronica.

—It’s as good if not better than Ezra Pound’s “In a Station in a Metro” and I’d be jealous but I would rather thank God for you, and let go.

Amen

Written by Rick McGinnis and Lynn Crosbie. Delivered by Rick McGinnis on the occasion of Kathy’s funeral.