I met Christina after her body was undone, but not for some time after—according to Janet it was taking her a while to want to interact with people who hadn’t known her before. But we sat next to each other at Emilie and Laurel’s wedding a few years later, and that evening I knew I was spending time with someone I wanted to have in my life. Her wit and charm bedazzled me as they did so many friends, students, family, colleagues, caretakers, people on the street. One special moment from that evening sticks in my memory. After the meal there was dancing. I turned to see Janet and Christina walk and wheel onto the floor. It was not their bodies I watched, though their circles were indeed quite elegant. No, it was their eyes. I saw everything I ever needed to know about love from how they looked at each other out there on the dance floor. It is their love for one another above all that remains in my memory. And will.

I have so many memories of Christina Crosby, but I will focus on my first real memory of her. The spring of my first year at Wesleyan, the nation was convulsed by the uprising in LA following the Rodney King verdict. There was a speak out on campus. Christina (Professor Crosby I must have said back then) strode out from the crowd, in that famous jacket, and spoke powerfully to the day. I don’t recall her exact words, just my awe that we had professors that would join us in solidarity with our grief and anger, and help give it words. I was also impressed that a white professor came forward to clearly oppose racism and police violence. That is also part of her legacy. After she spoke, our Congressional representative came up to speak and said something dismissive about “tenured radicals.” His contempt confirmed for me that radicals — tenured or not — were who I wanted to learn from. We will miss your great spirit, Christina, which no earthly injury could ever diminish. And I will keep learning from you.

A passage from Middlemarch that captures the beautiful, powerful influence that Christina Crosby has had on so many of us:

“The presence of a noble nature, generous in its wishes, ardent in its charity, changes the lights for us: we begin to see things again in their larger, quieter masses, and to believe that we too can be seen and judged in the wholeness of our character.”

In shared grief,
Jennie Kassanoff

Dearest C–

There’s a reason I’ve written about you, my graduate student model and gender hero. You fueled my Imaginary—with your brilliant beauty—subtle smile, strong body, bike over shoulder, and soft bearing in all your strength. (I was a feminist, trying to be a “woman.” Here was an image I could be down with.) You lent bent hope. You did then, you do now. You always will for me.

Villette forever,
Kathryn (Bond Stockton)

Christina offered the perfect mix of feminism, a searing mind, and kindness. Before and after the accident she was a brilliant and funny conversationalist. She was brave and creative under duress too, but also frank about how hard things could be. Our last hangout was at her & Janet’s Wesleyan home, where we sat in her disability-outfitted truck on the coldest day waiting for a battery to charge and talking our brains out. 

Oh, how I will dearly miss Christina — her conversation, her ZERO B.S. worldview, and, probably most of all, her utter kindness. The ONLY Pittsburgh Steelers fan with whom I would watch a Pats-Steelers game (well, maybe Janet). Until we meet again, friend.

Christina Crosby died last week. She was my colleague in the English department at Wesleyan University when I taught there from 2004 to 2007. Professor of Victorian literature and Gender Studies and much more. Just before I started teaching at the school she had been out cycling—she was a prodigious athlete—and a stick got caught in her spokes and she took a spill that left her a quadriplegic. Some years later she wrote about this in an extraordinary book, A Body, Undone: Living on After Great Pain. The “After Great Pain” part is a quotation from a poem by Emily Dickinson because that was how Christina rolled, erudition flowing out of her through her writing and her conversation, not in a stuffy way but as an organic part of how she experienced and talked about the world and herself. Once I told her about an uncomfortable blind date I’d had with an heiress. “That’s because you and she belong to different class fractions,” she said, grinning up at me from her wheelchair, and proceeded to explain this Marxist term to me and its ramifications for my dating life.

She was my loving ally at Wesleyan. She was a lot of people’s loving ally at Wesleyan and far beyond. I’d see her at a faculty party and she’d look at my wrists and go “Cuff links!” because she had this way of noticing you, zooming in on you, making you feel like you were important to her. Though we were not in each other’s innermost circle of friends, I was important to her, and she to me. But also this was how she basically interacted with humans, and it is what made her such a dynamite teacher and friend. I came over to her house for dinner once when her amazing partner, Janet, was teaching in the city. Christina cheerfully ordered me around her kitchen, and in so doing taught me what she needed as someone whose body did not operate as mine did. While we ate, she described to me a certain standard feature of women’s relationships to men in Victorian novels, and its connection to a short story of mine I’d given her to read. She was a consistently attentive and hugely helpful reader of my writing.

Our offices were down the hall from each other and once I invited her over to mine to make ink blot drawings with me, à la Rorschach but with multiple colored inks. Grasping the ink dropper, squeezing it inside the ink bottle, removing it, holding it over the paper, squirting the ink onto the paper, then folding and unfolding the paper to make a symmetrical design was not an easy series of movements for her, but she focused intently and produced several complex and vivid pieces. It got very quiet in my office as we did this activity together, no talking, both of us just doing these movements over and over, making art. At one point, her face angled down toward the task, those big gray-blue eyes wide open as her hand squirted ink onto the page in a pattern partly controlled and partly random, she whispered, “This is wild.”

Goodbye, my wild and beautiful friend.