(Editor’s note: I’ve known Jeanne Cordova for many years and wrote for her short-lived spiritual “transcendence” magazine. She is one brave and feisty lesbian feminist Latina, which she documents in When We Were Outlaws. Now she is dying, and while she may be weak, she is still feisty and brave as she talks about that taboo subject of death in this footnoted goodbye letter to her beloved LGBT community. And importantly, she is keeping a secret promise she made to herself to give half her estate to help others: she is bequeathing $2 million to the Astraea Lesbian Foundation for Justice. Sustaining Jeanne through this passage is radio talk show host Lynn Ballen, her partner of 25 years, with whom Jeanne has produced and curated LGBT community projects and shared her activism. As Jeanne says, this is a “thank you” letter to those who have loved and moved her. But it is the LGBT community that really must say thank you to Jeanne for all the courageous risks she took to advance the movement, especially refusing to accept lesbian invisibility. Thank you, Jeanne —Karen Ocamb)
A Letter About Dying, to My LGBT Communities
by Jeanne Cordova, September 23, 2015
This letter is meant as a notification and thank you to the thousands of members of the national lesbian community whose activism, lives, and Ioves have touched my own. Especially those dykes who have become family and siblings of choice over the last 40 years. Yes, the rumors are true, I have metastasized to-the-brain cancer. I am dying from it in my cerebellum.
I have had cancer since 2008. Colon cancer. For the first four years I brushed it off, as I’ve done many times with physical illness or difficulties. I continued my activism with the Lesbian Exploratory project and I finished my third book, When We Were Outlaws. The cancer came back in 2013. Metastasized first to my lungs and then to my cerebellum. Yes, my head. With brain and back-of-the-neck cancer it has been a downhill experience the last three years, with multiple operations, radiation and Chemo. This February I had Chemotherapy. Among a host of side-effects, it’s given me “chemo brain,” which amounts, basically, to “getting stupid.” Just saying. This month’s so-called side effect is peripheral neuropathy. That’s from Chemo, they say, and it makes your feet, fingers and hands feel tingling and numb like when you fall asleep on your leg or hands. Only, it doesn’t go away. I can’t stand up without holding onto a wall or background support. I can’t feel where my feet are. Yeek! I freak myself out talkin’ about it! How about you?
A guru once told me, “We die in increments, one piece at a time.” She meant one part of our body suddenly ceases to work, an elbow or a tongue. Seemingly for no reason, like a worn out knee. This came as a surprise. I thought we get old or die…suddenly, and all at once. Not so!
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