Weekly Round-Up: Remembering Scorchy

How much more heartbreak can our community take? I cannot bear to write the words this morning that Scorchy Barrington died this past week. I realize that newer readers to the round-up may not have come across Scorchy’s blog, The Sarcastic Boob, as she had stopped writing it a couple of years ago, but for those of us who have been together in this community for a longer period of time, Scorchy’s blog was a must-read – disquieting, intelligent, irreverent, and hard-hitting.  And for those of us who got to know her outside of the blog, we discovered she was all those things, and more. She had a wicked sense of humor and was always engaging and entertaining.  She loved her cat, her work, and her knitting. When I first started knitting, I turned to her for advice and she was the first person I connected with on the knitter’s social networking site Ravelry.

Re-reading her blog this morning, I found this image she shared – SO Scorchy!

Oh Scorchy, we knew you were here – your presence filled our world and we will miss you terribly. As Knot Telling has written so beautifully:

I needed you to be in the universe. We never met face to face, but oh! How we met soul-to-soul. You inhabited your words and I did mine and there we met.

Elizabeth has captured Scorchy’s spirit in her latest post,  and sums up my feelings too when she writes:

Scorchy, I loved you and I’ll keep on loving your smart ass, people lovin’ spirit that will live forever.  How will we detect all of the bullshit without you, friend?

Eileen‘s imagery of building a wall of the names of those we have lost to this disease is so powerful:

I imagine a wall taking dry cancer statistics and translating them into names. Every single name. One after another. I understand this would not be practicable because that wall would go on for miles and miles and miles, but I can imagine. When people visit that wall, they don’t see pink ribbons, dogs wearing bras, and other marketing gimmicks. Just a wall. A wall with name after name after name. Names of people who are loved and grieved by people who go on living with a large gaping hole where the person who died used to be. And visitors would understand that despite mammograms and ultrasounds, breast exams and annual checkups, real people still die from breast cancer after all.

I hope you will understand if my usual round-up is postponed until next week. I want  this week’s post to be for Scorchy alone.  My heart is too heavy and tired to do more than honor her incredible spirit.

Until next week

Yours with much love

Marie xxx