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Festival to Yemaya/Yemoja
Originally published May 2021
Kristin was a dear friend of mine who died 20 years ago this Memorial Day weekend (2021).
We met when I was just beginning my first public foray into the runes—for some reason she wanted me to teach her.
However, she was not entirely open to being taught, it was more that she wanted/needed a friend and had concluded that there had to be an initial purpose to the friendship.
Kristin had many, many problems.
I found out quickly that she was very unstable because she was hooked on crank (meth) and although she had somehow managed to keep a job, her economic situation was always on the edge.
She was also hopelessly in love in a co-worker—who liked her as that and a friend, but wisely saw her whole situation and tried to get her help more than once—which she just took as a sign of his own infatuation with her that he wouldn’t admit.
There were deeper issues though—ones that I didn’t understand at the time, but came to find out over the course of years.
Her mother had started to traffic her for sex when she was maybe 5-6 years old. By the time Kristin was 12 she was trying to escape her family (her parents had divorced and her father was relatively wealthy but out of touch with the kids).
So, her mother had her locked up in a private juvenile detention center somewhere down in Arkansas that was later closed down because the staff used drugs, terror and sex to terrorize and control the kids in their custody.
There are also rumors that kids housed in this facility where used as guinea pigs for testing so-called psycho-therapeutic drugs. Kristin told all kinds of stories about the place, but they were so wild I didn’t believe her at first until I read The Franklin Scandal by Nick Bryant.
I wish I had believed her.
Kristin struggled with and never overcome these traumas. But she really, really tried. Her father helped as he could—even parceling out increments of her inheritance over time for this or that scheme to get her off drugs, into a new apartment or to pay accumulated bills (all these several times over).
At her best Kristin was a talented musician and a natural herbalist and healer with substantial abilities as a seer. She was always generous with time and her money (when she had it) and threw the best parties—when she was drug free.
Eventually Kristin found the orisha, or they found her. She was initiated into Ifa, the African mother branch of the great Afro-Caribbean tree of faiths that has birthed Lucumi, Santeria, Candomble and many other orisha based practices. She became an olorisha (I think it’s what they are called in Lucumi) and specialized in joining people with their primary orisha and in some of the simple divination practices of Ifa.
She introduced me to the orishas, told me about my ruling and warrior orishas and made my eleke collars, which I still have and wear on occasion, in honor and memory of her (but never openly in public and only according to the rules I was taught).
Kristin got off crank, but soon found her solace in opioids, and during the prescription boom of the late 1990s found a way to manage a whole network of doctors to diagnose her with various problems that enabled an almost never ending supply. She was very, very good at working systems like that.
When that network caught on and started cutting her off, she took to more desperate measures and eventually began “staging” suicide events to get herself into hospitals. I say staging because she always made sure that she would be found by somebody—she always pre-arranged “a rescue.”
But that doesn’t mean I don’t think she wasn’t crying out for help. She would risk her life a little to get that extra bit of relief, that extra prescription for a month. Not even the orisha could help her at the end.
After her last grand suicide gesture, I, along with most of her other friends were pretty tired of it all. Taking the time-honored strategy of what 12 step programs call “tough love,” I told her that, unless and until she wanted to get well, even a little well, I didn’t want her to call me.
It was a bad decision on my part. I was wrong.
In the meantime, her addictions had caused her health to deteriorate, damaging her liver and pancreas—and this resulted in diabetes (she’d also had a periodic problem with her weight generally and, like many addicts, a poor diet).
Kristin died at some point over Memorial Day weekend, 2001, of a diabetic cardiac arrest due probably due to her addiction. She took too much oxycodone and forgot she needed her insulin—or that’s what the doctors concluded.
She died alone in a tiny apartment that state aid and remaining friends helped her get. She was found by one of those friends during a welfare check and authorities estimated she’d been dead at least 2-3 days.
Kristin was cremated by her mother and the creature step-father with no ceremony or memorial. Her belongings were sold or thrown away—except for a few items that one of her friends managed to get before the ransacking.
I was given several of these. I was later able to locate some of her books on Ifa at a local used bookstore, purchase them, and give them to her last friends for safe-keeping and memory.
At first, Kristin was really pissed off at me for abandoning her. We worked that one out over time. I let her yell at me. I agreed that I was wrong and I felt really shitty about it. I could have made other boundaries without being so absolute.
Kristin and I made peace with each other beyond her passing. She contacted me not long after her death and gave me instructions for how to ceremonially dispose of her Oya materials (Kristin’s primary orisha).
I asked her what else I could do and she told me I could take on some of the work she hadn’t finished. So, she asked me to continue her healing work—in whatever way I could.
With her help, healing has become part of what I do, despite having had little to no interest or aptitude for it before. Although I’m not the herbalist she was, I can get my way around plants now in a manner that used to elude me. She is one of my ancestors now.
She also told me I would meet her again before I died, that a small aspect of her soul would be reborn in someone that I would meet while they were a young child and I would recognize her in them. That hasn’t happened yet, but it could any day.
Now, every day, I do a brief healing ceremony, and every day, Kristin is with me for a little while. So, if you get some precious good mojo off of me in that regard, you’re getting some of her as well.
She is doing her recovery off world (which is harder than it might seem) and I have learned my lesson. I will not abandon anyone else ever again—not if I have anything to say about it.
Ibe se’ orisha! Ashe!
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