It is Veteran’s Day and I miss my friend Crysta Casey, who was a military journalist, poet, and painter. We met in 2002 at Red Sky Poetry Theatre (Seattle’s longest running open mic series). We were quite different people – she was 25 years my senior, a military veteran, and sufferer of extreme mental health issues – yet we had a very casual and organic friendship that came together quite effortlessly. It was only after her death, did I realize she was also my mentor and artistic advisor.
After the reading that night, Crysta and I talked on the street for a long time. She smoked cigarettes as we realized we shared similar poetic influences (Anne Sexton, Sharon Olds, the Surrealists, and others). We exchanged contacts to meet up and share poems. What started as frequent cafe meet-ups to read/critique each other’s work, eventually turned into a weekly date in Crysta’s Belltown apartment with wine and food and an exchange of books and literary magazines.
Over the next few years, Crysta became a dear friend. She kept me company through a lonely and difficult breakup. Sharing poems with her and keeping a practice of writing kept me going. Crysta honestly critiqued my work, and I think she really helped me to grow as a young poet/musician. She even helped find me an editor for my chapbook, Black Eden, though she didn’t live to see it published.
Crysta took herself quite seriously as a poet and lived an artistic lifestyle that I admired. She had a small studio apartment with bookshelves constantly overflowing with new and old books – a subscription to The New Yorker, literary magazines she’d recently been published in, or that an editor friend had given her, new purchases, and old chestnuts like T. S. Elliot with her father’s pencil markings in the margin.
Though she was continuously in motion with ideas, crafting poems, reworking them and writing in her journal, Crysta was somewhat of a hermit. Instead of shopping in person from local booksellers, she would order her poetry from Elliott Bay or Open Books: Poem Emporium, where owners John and Christine knew her well. A photo of Crysta and her beloved crotchety cat Varmint hung on the cork board near the register until new ownership took over.
Crysta had health issues that ranged from mental to physical. Like her cat, she was somewhat of a miracle – lucky to be alive. She had survived multiple abusive relationships and situations, cancer, schizophrenia, and a decade in the military as a journalist during the Vietnam Era. But when lung cancer came back, she couldn’t kick it a second time.
Cigarettes and rocking back and forth – this is the motion in which I remember Crysta moving. Her sound was a smoker’s laugh. She had to tried quit smoking many times, but I understood that the cigarettes and rocking were a medicine for her. Not a healthy medicine, but a love salve of daily coping. Smoking allowed her leave the apartment and function in society. It soothed her discomforts from the past as well as the sometimes nasty voices in her head. Her vice brought her closer to others like her and the writing that became of it was her life’s work. Her identity as a veteran was very strong. She was called to serve her country, and I think that in visiting the VA Hospital and clinics as often as she did, she continued that further developed that relationship with others like her.
In her poem “Inner Feelings” she admits: I am lonely for myself. I will read / a story aloud. My voice will break / the silence.
Being a smoker brought Crysta closer to many others who experienced turmoil like her. She would meet people on smoke breaks and write down their stories through narrative poetry – poems about outsiders, the downtrodden, veterans, handicapped, addicts, the under serviced, and unloved people in society. She gave their stories a place to live alongside her own. She was gruffly non-affectionate, yet extremely sensitive to the finer relations in life. In her books, Green Cammie, Rules for Walking Out, and Heart Clinic, Crysta captured the wounded heart.
Crysta died in the spring of 2008. She was hospitalized at the VA and couldn’t come to my wedding. She liked my now husband and told me, “don’t screw this one up!”
I found her gift to be a hilarious phone message that I saved for a long time, the sound of her voice in a capsule of time, soothing my feeling of sorrow now that she was gone. On the voicemail she said, “God bless you both… Even though I don’t believe in all that… ha ha ha…”
cough… cough
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Rest in Peace Crysta. Happy Veteran’s Day.
