February 21, 2010 10:46 AM

I have yet to be able to "get on with it" post Lee McQueen's apparent suicide. He was much more than a designer. He was a visionary and of profound significance to our culture. As for his mindset before his death, I may have been in close proximity to it at a time when my mother became seriously ill and was lost to me as a result of that illness, my marriage and creative partnership had fallen apart, and the band I had uprooted my entire life for and given everything in my being to was ending. All 3 things hit me and I no longer had the heart to live. I lost an incredible amount of weight and had no focus. Things happened during this period that I am still paying for (literally) today. If it were not for a friend taking me to see a woman's art show of fire-like paintings , friends in New York who told me to come to them so they could take care of me during that time, and yet another friend who helped me heal through a a tribal ritual igniting energy, I don't know what would have happened. I might be stronger now as a result of that time yet I can go back to that place in my entire being's memory and experience it again with profound empathy.

I have *lived* through this...the stages of mourning.