Community Tributes to Claudia Whittingham
L.E.T.G.O. Poetry Workshop: A Tribute to Claudia Whittingham by Sandrine Dupiton
The irony. I am not necessarily the best at letting things go. However, fifteen years ago, I felt called to lead a workshop entirely focused on exploring the transformative power of doing so. They say, “create what you need,” so I did. Claudia Nicole Whittingham, champion of dopeness, of grace, of magic, and I were introduced online a few years before through a mutual friend, Ranique, who thought we should know each other since we were both educators, and Claudia could likely support the program for young women I was leading in Philadelphia where we were both living at the time. Oh, and we just so happened to also be birthday twins — July 13th! Three years later, both of us now in New York, she’d reached out about signing up for L.E.T G.O.: an experiential poetry workshop—a space for creative healing, contemplation and spiritual life coaching as much as it was a poetry writing workshop. I was thrilled.
She was incredible throughout the experience and at some point towards the close of the sessions, I even let her lead one. At our closing community showcase, Claudia, who moved like fire and felt like water, danced around the room: her performance of choreopoems was a reflection of her indomitable spirit, penetrating clarity, courageous vulnerability, creative depth, whimsical joy—her brilliance.
Her sheer ability to get people hyped in a room—the cacophony of energy was balanced by the stillness she shared moments before—the both-and-ness of her light should be studied. I can feel it all in those pictures, as I look back. I see it in my face. I loved her real real bad and I know that she knew it.
Thirteen years later she called me from a hospital to pray for and with her. An inner circle friend, a cosmic twin through and through, we were each others’ spiritual teachers in the way the wise ancestor bell hooks describes loving—we extended ourselves to nurture each others’ spiritual growth. She was a crowned Oshun priestess whose evolution I witnessed and whose wisdom I admired. I was honored that she called me. I completely believed in a full recovery. I needed to.
The following spring, I was honored again to lead in facilitating a unique restorative memorial experience with a room filled with people supporting our beloved’s work: attempting to find comfort in the aftermath of loss. A year later, honored again, when Carolyn asked me to write this tribute in African Voices Magazine, the institution where our friendship was forged. Being a year removed from the initial persistent pangs of undulating shockwaves of a close friend, my first friend, joining the ancestors.
The heart work it would require was its own revelation—the uncomfortable quiet of remembering; the bouldering gravity of grief; the heightened awareness of the tender intimacy of allowing a person, otherwise a stranger, to touch my emotional core; rattling it in a way that I have never experienced. Being still enough to learn what my heart, my shy soul, might want to express on a page is the work I did not know I needed. What is crystal clear is: in the same space of the grief of not being able to talk to her or ask her so many things about so many of all the things, I am buoyed by the precious treasure of loving such a person for the time that I got to.
Now no birthday will ever be the same—that is true. And what is also true, I kid you not, in this emotionally challenging space of gathering her poetic artifacts and my thoughts, a few nights ago, in a dream, her hair red and pulled up, she came to me excitedly talking about our next birthday. So dope.
A love that transcends is a love that lets go: lets go of tears dammed and shuttered away (tears were something you wrote about often in your poems during LET GO); lets go of numbing emotions too closely tied to the frays of loss; allows grief to do its work on a heart not well practiced in losing someone so close, so meaningful—an invitation to open to love more fearlessly and with deeper gratitude.
This process of recording a written tribute has allowed me to face your passing as if for the first time: quietly with words as a bridge between realms. My teacher from beyond. I understand even more potently, the quiet power and unique gift Ms. Claudia Nicole Whittingham was, is.