Hillary
Thoughts on the loss of a childhood friend
My childhood friend Hillary died early this morning from injuries she sustained in a car accident in Knox County, Indiana. It’s a jarring, senseless tragedy that leaves the pure ugliness of grief in its wake. She’s survived by her mother and her daughter, as well as a multitude of friends who have shared the sting of this thing earlier today.
Despite the fact that the two of us had drifted apart since high school, we occasionally would check in with one another. Niceties, really. She would ask me about writing, and I would ask her about the pictures she’d take. And that was it, really.
But when I think about Hillary, I think about the word authenticity. Because no one I know seemed to live their life with as much passionate authenticity as she did. She was a loving mother and a true artist. She captured pure emotion in her work. When she wrote, she quoted Modest Mouse and Allen Ginsberg liberally. She believed in a greater collective consciousness and revolution. She believed in an utter lack of bullshitting, to put it plainly.
We talked about collaborating once, about a decade ago. I was home for spring break and broken-hearted, and we texted one another about coming up with a project: her pictures, my words. But it never came together. By the time I actually set foot in Knox County, I was too chickenshit to actually return her messages. And for what reason? Who knows.
More than a couple of my friends modeled for Hillary at various times over the years. She was always looking for subjects to practice her craft. She took my friends’ engagement photos. Other times, she would take her subjects to deserted and broken down parts of Knox County and do her work, of which she was a master.
My favorite part of her body of work, however, is her self-portraiture. In these photos, beyond the exposure and the nudity and the transgression of it, there’s also a raw intensity. There is a look in this woman’s face that clearly says I have seen some shit and come through on the other side.
Later photos display some of these same hallmarks; the careful poses, orchestrated to fit within arbitrary standards of obscenity or lack thereof, but there’s some fun there, too. An open umbrella, held beneath a sunny sky. Smiles. Playfulness. Curiosity. Joy.
My friend Carrie talked today about some photos Hillary had taken a few years ago that she had modeled for, and how there’s a kind of truth that shows through in them: that even as Carrie occupied the space and shifted her body in poses, the level of discomfort was obvious. Our former hometown was no longer her home. She was there temporarily. She had moved on. And Hillary had been the one to capture that.
I think there’s something to that, really. There are a handful of us in that group who might dare to call ourselves artists. Carrie’s a filmmaker. I’m a writer. Some are musicians and dancers. Hillary, if not capturing the truth, sought it out.
We are scattered across the face of this nation — if not this Earth — in different places, both figuratively and literally. And we all have a different relationship to that collective space. Some want to keep running, to escape it; to not get stuck there. Some of us — like me — fight desperately to recapture our connection to it in our work. Some of us are ambivalent.
But Hillary stayed there, nestled among the Sycamores and the two-lane highways, and she painted upon it in shades of neon. She used it as her canvas and her dark room, and she captured something in her art that maybe those of us who’ve left the geography behind might never glimpse again: the authenticity I spoke of earlier.
She was an iconoclast and a rebel. A friend. A daughter. A mother. She’ll be sorely missed. And the world will be lacking a little bit of color for her absence.
A fund has been set up to help assist in funeral expenses as well as to help provide for Hillary’s daughter, Delilah.
