"I Got Her Name Tattooed On My Chest..."
Amy Montegut
“I’m chasing Amy, retracing my steps, smoke tracing my breaths
I still smell her clove linger off of Lefferts and Grand
If you don’t know about love or death then you just won’t understand”
Grief can be a story told again and again.
I’ve told this story before. At least parts of it. I had a friend that I loved. They died suddenly.
It is not the first time I have experienced loss. It isn’t even the first time I felt tragedy. That would be when Tiesha passed…
But this loss, its timing, and who was taken from us, hit me close and I was not the same.
I’m the type that likes to find the meaning in things and believe, perhaps naively, that there is meaning indeed to be found in everything. But what is the meaning of loss, or death other than to experience grief?
I do not have the patent on grief. I’ve felt the urge to skip past how uniquely amazing Amy was. That it would sound cliche to hype her up posthumously like an angel among us. But she was. It peaked out in the warmth of her smile and the wholeness of her embrace. It was in the aroma of the cookies she baked from scratch or the scent of the shampoo in her hair that she made herself. I remember Amy would send me her poetry. “Why is she sending this to me?” I thought. I read her poem entitled Aubade and wondered if I was even developed enough for my opinion on it to matter. Amy acknowledged so much of my potential even before I did.
All this and I only encountered this woman in one facet of her life. My “Brooklyn-is-the-center-of-the-universe” existence couldn’t anticipate a New Orleans transplant affecting me so deeply. I remember the last time I saw Amy in person and the plans we made. Plans that never came to fruition. I’ve known Amy longer now in memory than in person and here I sit on a rainy day in New Orleans where I now reside, her city. My first trip to New Orleans in 2014, nearly seven years after Amy’s passing, ended with my final day taking a trip to where she is entombed. My life had come full circle.
Amy called me once to read a poem, “it’s called ‘For (my government name)’”. I remembered smirking to myself on the phone in anticipation to see if this was a joke or not. It wasn’t. Her poem haunts me still. It leaves me wondering what she saw in me and how she was able to see parts of myself that I had yet to get fully in touch with. On my album Private Stock, I reenact a casual moment of a woman asking me about the “name tattooed on my chest”, Amy Montegut which sits below this poem. That moment and the poem frame my attempt to reconcile loss of a loved one, from a beloved place, Brooklyn which also now feels in memoriam.
This past October would have been another birthday for Amy. I had recently visited her gravesite in Bayou St. John while filming the Lyrics Decoded for Reprise. I had to allow myself to remember her again, allow myself to still feel connected to her, and the moments I had the privilege to share in her presence. After Amy’s passing my dear friend and brother Shaka had a thrown together an observance for her in the living room of his apartment. I lived upstairs. Aside from our known mutuals there were friends of hers from New Orleans that also migrated to Brooklyn. In the years afterward, living in New Orleans, I often wondered if I was walking past these friends of hers, sitting next to one in a bar, or dancing past them at a party.
While reviewing the footage from Amy’s resting place, not in full cognition of the date’s significance, I received a direct message from a stranger.
“We met once, years ago, in someone’s tiny apartment at a memorial for my childhood best friend, Amy. Amy and I grew up together and both landed in Brooklyn. Today’s her birthday. I remember from that day that you got a tattoo of her writing on your chest. Just felt the nudge to say hey, you were a friend of hers and it’s her birthday. Trying to listen to my nudges more…”
Years later and Amy still impacts my life. She still finds a way to make me feel connected. I am finally starting to understand what she left for me in her poem. A message to study for the rest of my days; to pay attention to the nudges. It is on my heart, so I will never forget. Thank you friend, thank you for letting me be a part of your story, for being a part of mine and still giving me stories to tell.
