Tina

Simply The Best

Dear Tina,

This morning, I woke up to the news that you have died.

I resist the use of popular euphemisms, like passing away or crossing over because you neither liked nor practised sugar-coating.

If ever there was a living, beating heart on stage — inside all the hair, the legs, the moves — it was yours.

I remember seeing you for the first time as a kid back in Europe, on one of my neighbours’ TV screens. I didn’t understand a word you sang, but your presence mesmerized me. I felt as if sparks were flying under your feet.

Eventually, I learned the lyrics of “What’s Love Got To Do With It,” and it became, together with Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive,” the iconic song of my youth. Unlike my peers, I wasn’t given to listening to American music, probably because I didn’t have many opportunities to do so.

Back then, I could never imagine how much I would come to need both of those songs or that the time would come when I found the word I didn’t know back then —  the precise word to describe what I saw in you all those years ago. What you meant to me then and ever since.

The word — Resilience.

I felt it before I could name it. It is how love works — the one that has everything to do with it, the one that starts as a blaze deep inside our bellies and becomes a torch that lights our path. For as long as we walk. 

Thank you… I mean really — Thank YOU. 

Now… Let’s roll on the river.