My Beautiful Jocie
I have been conspicuously missing from the tributes on this website, having been Joce’s closest friend for nearly 40 years. I made it to San Francisco just in time to have a last conversation as she lay dying. I wish I had come months before — but she told me not to. She resolutely believed a treatment would work, even at that advanced stage. Neither of us could countenance the reality of her death. At the least I expected to sit beside her for some weeks and talk of important things and give comfort as best I could. Instead she greeted me and parted from us the next day. The rest of my time in San Francisco was spent sobbing in the arms of her two other closest friends, Scott and Gabe, walking the rainy streets to get deli sandwiches and dismantling her beautiful, intricate life box by box.
She still lived in the apartment I vacated 30 years ago when I moved to France. I went through the process raw and exposed like my bones were showing, walking through time and space, desperately wanting to hear her voice. It felt like she was in a far-away country without good cell coverage and in despair I called her phone to hear the chirpy message she’d used for 30 years (Hi this is Jocelyn, please leave your message after the tone!). I broke down. Her home was full to bursting with stuff, research and memories. Going through the layers was also dismantling my own life — I knew all her stages and even discovered two crammed boxes of (my) abandoned love letters she’d saved. I found a small wooden box containing the ashes of our ginger-white cat Dandy (Dandelion Snowpeach, named by our goddaughter Osha) who had been the cat of our collective hearts — entrusted to her when I left. She had loved him wildly. Dandy was special; held like a baby he would stroke my cheek with his paw when I was sad. Going to the airport, Scott, Gabe and I buried his ashes by a fragrant and shady tree deep in the Presidio.
Quite simply I loved Jocelyn with a fierce love. I was honoured to lovingly dismantle her life. And what a life it was. No one I’ve ever met (and I’ve been around) laughed so often and with such abandon, cared so deeply about people and animals, so loved the sensations of life, was as CURIOUS or had such compassion. She was the most intelligent, caring person I ever met and the kindest by a long mile.
I met Jocelyn through a mutual friend on a sunny day in Muir Woods in 1978, the air as fresh and clean and gleaming as the two of us. I was just back from Europe and the winds of optimism were washing over me from the magical community of Findhorn in the Highlands of Scotland. I had come to California to further my healing skills and Joce was fresh from travelling in exotic countries for her Masters Degree on cross-cultural education and dancing in the streets of 1970’s Iran, Afghanistan and India for money to survive. (Did I say she was brave?) For unknown reasons I had braided my blonde hair and pinned it across my head like Heidi. She looked at me through her wild, reddish flowing curls and thought, wow what a repressed person, I bet I could help her. I looked at this little slip of a girl (still a teenager) in her low-cut slinky dress and strappy heels and thought, wow who the hell is that - she’s one-of-a-kind! From that day to her last we had a “mind-meld” and never stopped talking and sharing— in the snows of Moscow’s Soviet Union, the Paris of my modelling days, traipsing the Swiss Alps, the White Mountains of New Hampshire, at the sea in Sydney, our hometowns and more. We held noteworthy soirees in San Francisco.
By the time I was grown I had lost the four primary people who had loved me truly; my mother, grandmother, my little sister Faith (who was love incarnate though born severely brain damaged) and my second mother - our black nanny who lived with us and cared for little premature me. Now I’ve lost the person who took their place; my center, my rock, my heart — the friendship that has defined me. In common we had been blessed with exceptionally creative and loving mothers (both Vassar girls) who had bequeathed the courage to take risks and to follow our dreams, no matter how crazy. I had lost my mother at fourteen and Joce was the only person who recognised the depth of my grief — and in doing so saved me. We needed each other to make sense of the world and to be seen to our cores. And we needed to give back to the world the great gift of love we had received.
In truth I am enormously lucky to have had such a friendship. I see that now, as the weeks flow into months. I began to write the day I returned to Sydney in mid-March and am still writing trying to make sense of her loss. She was more than a friend — we felt like twins who had been separated at birth; similar in spirit yet opposite sides of a coin, dark and light, Carmen and Alice-in-Wonderland existing in our own universe. We couldn’t have looked more different yet were sometimes asked if we were twins. We were attracted to different men (though we agreed on Mel Gibson in his heyday) and had completely different kinds of relationships. She was an extrovert, I an introvert and we completed each other. She did however think my lack of flirting skills was a real failing. She tried to teach me by mimicry as we looked into a mirror. I failed miserably at the lip pout. She was a master of the sensual game, just another aspect of life she adored and excelled in.
Jocie knew so much about… everything! She took private lessons from a top theoretical physicist, hung out with a neurosurgeon in the early days of the burgeoning field of brain sciences (he’s famous now) and basically picked the brains of anyone with info she craved. She must’ve read 10,000 books and her understanding of overviews on nearly any subject was mind-boggling. There was a time when she regularly rebuffed the Mensa people who bugged her to join (in going through her multitude of papers I found a Mensa test that put her in the top percentile of intelligence). She just laughed her irresistible laugh and told them they were boring. She made learning an art and her ideas were unique and sometimes brilliant. She knew the Internet would become big well before even early experts suspected and we almost became squillionaires. She just knew stuff.
But with great gifts come great challenges. Jocelyn was a purely emotional being. She just felt so damn much, imagined too much and this onslaught of feeling made her vulnerable in this life. She processed everything — it was a compulsion to understand herself and what made people tick, even the people who hurt her. But she didn’t deserve cruelty in this life. She could be frustrating, bossy, unorganised, hyper-organised and hysterical. Yet as far as I could tell she only “lost it” when focused, intelligent communications failed and/or cruelty was done. But then she would lose it completely. She could never accept human rigidity, meanness, hate or prejudice but strove incessantly to penetrate their mysteries. She essentially dedicated her whole life to understanding the human brain and psyche and she became an expert in the field, intellectually and practically (therapeutically).
Talking with her mother in the days after her death, it seems that Joce’s cancer might well have started years ago, precipitating her odd weight gain and loss of energy. Misunderstood perhaps as the reaction to cruelty done and as doctors looked in other places, her weight was judged and likely mistaken. True to form, she became an expert in the scientific understanding of the complexities of weight gain. But the result was that she suffered and backed away from the world into her own intellectual sphere. It was a profound loss to the world then and remains so now.
However, the hallmark of her last years was that she continued to climb ever further out onto the barest limbs to get to the truth — the truth that can potentially heal. She could have gotten several PhDs with her knowledge — and practical skills. She remained ravenous, like a wild beast to understand life’s mysteries and she never stopped working with people who needed her. She was incensed by injustice, brought to bitter tears if an animal suffered and called 911 so often to report wrongdoings that they knew her voice (she told me laughing). But where she truly made her mark was as a therapist. She was the best I’ve ever met and I’ve met a few. Her gift lay in her uncanny empathy, the ability to understand down to the guts where complex blockages lurked, what we were afraid to face and to find a healing place. She hated being called “psychic”, but she was. By “tuning in” she just knew our deepest secrets. And she never defaulted to easy or obvious judgements — and this is hard to do —- I strain to not jump to conclusions about assholes all the time. Even through her hurt she never condemned, not ever.
She taught me to stay with my anger and see what lay behind it. Having been brought up by a father with, to put it politely, “a temper” I shied away from confrontation. In fights with boyfriends I often exploded and threw things (at them). I broke a lot of windows before I met her. In fact we used to fight too — physically (until we couldn’t when she got too good at martial arts). It always happened after not seeing each other for awhile that we would come to blows. She would (she admitted) pick at me or get jealous of something or be unreasonable rather than come out with what was frustrating her. I regularly exploded, closed down, stomped out and intended never to see her again. But she would entice me back and we would get to the bottom of it for both of us. Through this process I learned to persevere and to go beneath my anger and hurt — to find the love. To understand the other’s pain. I learned to listen. I became a better person.
In her life she gave this enormous gift to a large number of people, and it was very often those who had fallen through the cracks with no money and no one to be their advocate. Did I say she was generous? Into our psyches she went —where angels feared to tread, to that seething place of hurts and rage, seeking the truth to pull us into a bigger, forgiving mind. Her intense optimism for humanity, despite her personal irreparable shocks, never wavered. For her the mysteries of human pain just became more compelling and vital to unlock. Perhaps the last person she counselled was my friend Michael. As ill as she was, she rallied for him with a clear voice and clear advice —stern but true. He still tried other solutions, but in the end she had nailed it. The truth really does set us free.
Now she is not here to edit this. She would’ve torn it apart, made it simpler, better. Everyday I need to talk to her to understand an issue, get an overview, find clarity of heart. It leaves me unbearably lonely, despite the many people I love. She just made living fun —- a grand adventure. And the painful truth is she wasn’t finished— she still had so much to give. Her greatest wish was for her legacy of writings to be put to practical use. I hope this will come about.
Her loss for me is immediate. We were finally getting somewhere with our long-term project, EcoGuinea. We had formed it together, an NGO to bring green, simple eco-technologies to Guinea, West Africa. We had done several projects including sponsoring a successful intensive Ebola education journey to many at-risk villages at the height of that epidemic. 40 Guinean volunteers had trained with the Red Cross and set off in buses. Jocie had developed our website, our strategies and had conferred with our trusted director Lamzo in Conakry. We’d just become a Foundation in Australia and the Guinean government had just given us land to build our EcoCenter and model organic farm. She never tired of talking about the solutions that already exist for the problems the world faces today and had clear ideas about the architecture of the building. When we finally build it - a living eco-school for all Guineans, it will be in her honour.
Jocelyn was interested in just about everything. She actively maintained many Scoop-it! sites and 109 Pinterest boards with nearly 50,000 pins. And she read and absorbed all that information. Her diverse titles include: Brain, Behaviour, Belief, Bias and Blindspot, Healing the Hurt: Treatment and Advocacy, Solving Global Problems: Organisations and Approaches, Eco Solutions (of a dizzying variety), Damage Caused by Oligarchs, Cancer and Research Advances, Beautiful Designs, Knots, Tiles and Twining Designs and Art I Like. But her biggest and primary concern was always for children. She couldn’t bear the thought of any child doing without, especially the bonding that allows them to form healthy selves. This issue occupied her intensely for well over 20 years. She loved her mother and stepfather’s work with babies and bonding. She would light up when talking about the ways to break the cycles of damage or of the irreducible needs of children. All the world’s children were her children. We had this in common.
In Guinea fifteen Imams came together to pray for her in February 2016 and they sacrificed a goat. There was much weeping and prayers after her death. Through our EcoGuinea family perhaps hundreds of people knew her as someone who worked tirelessly to help them improve their lives. She cared and they knew it. Since I’d gone to Guinea in 2000, when my main concern in life became to help them lift their lives (I always felt I received more than anyone — they inspire me so much), Jocelyn had jumped in with both feet to help. She was thrilled that we might be able to share her years of expertise in child development, her overviews of how to shift patterns of poverty. She thought that Guinea (world’s 10th poorest country), so long isolated, would be the ideal place to introduce changes and wrote about it on the website. I can’t fathom that she’ll never meet the children she loved; “little Mardi” Lamzo’s daughter who’s seven now or the two little girls who were orphaned by Ebola and were adopted into Lamzo’s family.
This is Jocelyn’s last email to me:
Don't give up EcoGuinea.
I'm getting labs tomorrow to see if chemo helping or not. Don't know if dying or not.
Endless discomfort and pain and nausea make me want to die sometimes.
Please use unconscious to get out of depression. We have our shared house in our minds - our big sprawling house with hidden passages. Find cushiony room with rain trickling on skylight. Call on all the powerful women we can trust to nurture us, past and present (even Faith), and surrender to them.
Will let you know results of tests by end of week.
Please detach from my pain - in fact, ask that I detach from my pain too!
You are my truest partner. I can't have you suffering with me.
Miss you so much.
But I am suffering. Terribly. Yet life must go on and my kids in Africa must eat and go to school. In Jocelyn's name I will continue. She walks with me now inside of me.
I am full of love.
- Mardi Kendall
To see Jocelyn’s work visit her extensive and exceptional site: www.overcominghate.com
Or her Scoop-it sites: http://www.scoop.it/u/jocelyn-stoller
Or her Pinterest sites: https://au.pinterest.com/jocelynstoller1/
Also the site she did for her mother and step-father: http://www.bondingandbirth.org/
Donations to Jocelyn's beloved EcoGuinea Foundation and the children are very welcome:
http://www.ecoguinea.org/how-to-donate.html
