death and grief don’t care about our plans, so Tonya Ingram didn’t make it to see 2023.
Fourteen years ago I was a child who had raised themself. I don’t mean to talk about it as often as I do because I am weary of how narratives become cloaks that drown us in stories about who we are, draping past our feet onto the ground and tripping us as we try to move forward—but this is not a prescriptive story I cling to, just a stone truth I remember in small moments when I struggle to use a can opener because I didn’t have a parent to teach me, or when I wake up at 5 am to the news that an old friend who gave me words to learn who I was has… died.
This morning was one such morning.
If you’d ever been to Da Poetry Lounge in Los Angeles in recent years, you might have met Tonya Ingram, or heard her poetry. Or maybe you followed her on Instagram. Or heard her at a reading. There are so many of us who were lucky enough to witness her or be witnessed by her, to know her words and her light.
I haven’t been to the small blackbox theater in years but had been planning to go this spring when I return to visit friends in California. I have a lot of plans. I was going to reach out to Tonya about my poetry book. I was going to tell her how excited I was to have her in the dedication section. I saved that for the new year. I ignored 700 unread text messages. And now she’ll never get to read the message I was going to send, or the dedication.
As a teenager, I used to hop on the 4 bus every Tuesday evening and walk to Fairfax High School to stand in line for DPL, where I got to spend time with and be mentored by most of my favorite poets in the world. I don’t remember at what point or in what year I met each of them, or when I broke out of my shell of shyness to start a conversation with Mayda or Tonya or Yesika or Shihan. I just remember all the ways in which people who had no real reason to make space for a little white kid who never knew when to shut up still took me under their wings and brought me into their homes and made me coffee, and taught me how to write more precisely, and helped me find who I was and still am.
When I moved back to New York for college, I transferred to the Nuyorican, where Vanessa who I’d met in LA was, and Tonya was part of. I don’t remember how we met, if it was first in LA or New York. I just remember that Tonya, a few years older than I am, was always kind and soft, though there were many reasons life had given us both not to be.
I’m not a kid anymore though I’m still learning when to shut up. I am still learning when to make room for others, and who needs and deserves a wing, or to be invited in for a coffee or a lesson in words. It is hard to think that someone like Tonya, one of the people who most prominently taught me how to write about grief and healing, is gone and now leaves such large shoes to fill (as cliche as the old adage is).
Tonya taught me, and taught many of us, that there are many cracks in the world where love should be, and darkness pours out of them.
It is okay to see the darkness, and it is also okay to see beyond it and find a way to fill it in with something else. With kindness. With patience. With grace. For ourselves and others.
I don’t know really what to take away from Tonya’s death other than that I will keep passing on the lessons she taught me over the years to other people. But I know what I am going to do with the gift that Tonya gave us with her life. That I am going to spend the rest of mine being generous with myself and others, even in the moments when it would be simpler not to be.
At the moment, there’s not much else to say, just a lot of pain pouring out of my chest and tears and tears and tears that my tongue becomes more familiar with by the hour. And that’s okay. Sometimes there are not words, even as a poet. Sometimes there’s only space to fill, or space to let be a while.
Tonya died of lupus, simply put. She died because all she needed was a kidney and she could not get one. But really Tonya died because she—a person who made everyone she knew feel cared for—lived in a world where systems deprive us of the care we need to survive, for no good reason.
As I live, I will take Tonya’s memory, her laughter and her sadness, and keep trying to build a world where everyone gets the care they deserve. Imagine a world where we all do. I know that Tonya did every day.
