maria black

1975–2019

I once asked Maria what she liked about our relationship. She said, “I always liked the moments when it felt like you and me against the world.” There’s no antagonism implied here; it’s just that there’s delight in a sense of shared weirdness, subversiveness, or naughtiness.

One night, back in Indiana, Maria and I were sitting on the couch at my place, curled up together under a blanket and listening to music or whatever. My housemate Chris came in and sat down at the computer next to the couch, to check his email or do homework or whatever. Maria and I both kind of stopped talking, because we both felt weird having a conversation that would be overheard. However, we’d occasionally make noises and giggle at each other, and Chris definitely shot us a few bemused looks before he finally got up and left. I didn’t tell him until Maria’s memorial that, with our hands under the blanket there, we were thumb wrestling.

Those who were close to us in 2018–19 saw the time when I was taking care of Maria. For most of our first decade together it was quite the other way around. She did her level best to help her severely-depressed boyfriend through the notoriously difficult first years of teaching (and credential classes), and then through the equally notoriously difficult years of grad school. And she stuck with me through a long-distance relationship that went on far longer than a long-distance relationship ever should. We learned a lot together.

From Maria, I learned about the concept of manufactured spending. Just as she was a master at organizing concepts into taxonomies and indexes for the web, she was great at managing complex finances. She had to be, to succeed as a freelancer for over ten years. In recent years, this interest in finances blossomed into one of the weirdest, most endearingly dorky hobbies I’ve ever heard of: she studied frequent-flier programs, credit-card offers, and rewards programs. Studying, here, means analyzing their costs and benefits, learning how to extract maximal value from the reward points in any given program, tracking the spending categories currently offering the highest rewards, and watching for card offers that promised large amounts of cash back if you reached a spending threshold (usually of a few thousand dollars) in the first months of having the card. She did this partly for the cash — some card offers would pay a reward of several thousand dollars if you make enough purchases in the first few months — but mainly for the satisfaction of extracting money from usurious card companies, in what I’d say was a protest against the amorality and inequity of the financial system. This is where that phrase manufactured spending comes in. If she had a new card offering rewards for buying office supplies, she might go to Staples or Office Depot — sorry, Office Despot, she’d invariably say — and pick up a load of gift cards for the businesses we commonly shopped at, knowing that she’d use them and get back a four-figure bonus from the card company. If a card offered big rewards on home improvement, she’d send me off to Home Despot (likewise) which in this case we eventually took to calling “the Autocrat.” And so it was that I wound up inheriting more gift cards than I knew what to do with.

We shared some amusement in the perversity of that process. She was, at heart, deeply committed to the values of equality, justice, and learning. As an undergrad she was a volunteer peer counselor for the medical clinic’s sexual health program, helping other young women understand themselves and their bodies better. She gave freely in support of equal rights and civil liberties. She understood that having no money is more expensive than having some, that opportunity is not equally distributed to all, and that we have some moral responsibility to rectify those inequities.

From Maria, I learned a lot about what love really means. We each sacrificed a lot for the other, secure (from our second year together) in the knowledge that, when it came down to a situation like Maria’s cancer, we’d face it together. As eventually we did. And we still had fun and laughter, even in her last few months. My experience with her has made my life feel complete and fulfilled; I know not everyone gets to have such an experience, and I am thankful that I did.

Maria was not one to suffer fools gladly, and I wouldn’t wish her an afterlife of exasperation with our foolish mortal decisions. I am content to believe that Maria is still with me in all the idioms, inflections, and other habits of speaking that I picked up from her. Who knew? I will think of her every time I have a meal that grabs me by the lapels and yells “GARRRRRRRLIC!”; when I feel a frisson of joy from using a well-made appliance; and when, told of exasperatingly stupid behavior, I can only wail plaintively, “Nooooooo!” Her voice is with me, lending commentary to the stupid, the silly, the exciting, the appalling, and whatever else I encounter. She is with me in our shared desire for justice, honesty, and compassion. She is with me in the memory of her sweet and gentle touch. And that is enough for me.