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.