We Are All Mortal
Lest we forget, we are often reminded of how fleeting life can be, when we lose a friend.
One of the things that happens as one gets older is that you start losing people. When I was in high school, and then in college, we thought we were invincible and immortal. Of course, we knew that really wasn’t true, but the chances were, God willing, that we would all live long and productive lives, and leave this earth as wise old elders after our long race was won. We didn’t expect that cancer or an accident or heart failure would fell us in our prime, or in some cases, even before.
Most of us lived with the expectation that the near future would have us see personal and financial success, have a family, new and old friends, and that we’d be able to do some of the things that we always wanted to do, like travel the world. But we are not promised tomorrow.
The year after college I was living in the Bronx in a small, rented room in a stranger’s apartment. One day I received word that one of my college friends, who was only 22 like me, had died in a traffic accident. A year after Yale, with the future bright before him, and he was gone. I can still picture the room I was in and the call. My illusion of immortality was shattered.
Fifteen years later, I was losing people that I cared about to AIDS. In 1985, the biggest blow to my life was, and remains, the sudden loss of my Mom. By then, any illusions I may have had about death coming for us whenever, were long gone. Many others have followed in the years since, including my father and other relatives. People I knew, the parents of those I knew, family, total strangers dying in terrorist attacks, war, natural disasters, crime and from the fragility of our bodies. I’ve written about some of them before, and will no doubt write about others, and someday, someone will hopefully write about me.
My friend Sage died this June. She had colon cancer which metastasized and took her in a matter of months. I never even heard that she was sick until a few weeks before she passed. She never told too many people that she was terminally ill. I had last seen her in person in 2022 at our 45th college class reunion. But I had seen and talked with her only a month or two before on Zoom and on the phone.
If anyone was going to be sick and dying out of my circle of Yale friends, Sage was last on the list. She had always been in great shape, was active, a zealot about eating nutritious, fresh food, never ate all that much anyway, never ate junk food or sweets, didn’t drink or smoke, and was well-known to have a special tea in her vast collection of herbal remedies that would cure anything. I still have one of the teabags she gave me once that would cure my sore throat after I had thyroid surgery. I can’t use it now, it’s precious.
After most of us heard about her illness, she went into hospice care. I wanted to see her and say goodbye. I was in NYC to lead a Brooklyn walking tour soon after and arranged with my college friend John to go to a remote part of the Bronx to see her. When we got there, she was asleep, and didn’t wake up while we were there, we stayed for several hours.
I just stared at her. The Sage I knew was already gone, she had wasted away to skin and bones, her body barely defined under the sheets, her cheekbones sharp against her skin. One of her sons and a close friend from her Music and Art high school days were at her bedside, the friend playing the music they had both listened to and loved back in the day. The volume was low and the music just wafted across the bed and swirled around us. Some of the tunes I hadn’t heard in decades. It was so familiar, and with it came memories of college and years soon after, as late ‘70s and ‘80s R&B and smooth jazz rekindled some of the events we shared during those years.
Some of the artists he played were well known to Sage and her friend. (I’m horrible with names, so please forgive me.) They had gone to high school with some of them, or knew them professionally, or had friends and family who worked with many of them, or they had worked with some of the artists themselves. It was a wonderful legacy to have contributed to this body of music. The staff assured us that although she couldn’t respond, Sage could hear us, hear the music, and feel our love.
When we left, I kissed her on the forehead and told her I loved her, as did John. The ride back to Manhattan was long, there was a lot of construction on the Cross Bronx Expressway, and although John and I can easily talk for hours about any number of things, (he’s an architect, so that alone can keep us going) we didn’t say much on the way back. What can you say when you know you’ll never see someone on this side ever again? Sage slipped away only three days later. The funeral was private.
About a month later, Giancarlo, Sage’s son, and the faculty at the Dalton School, a private prep school on the Upper East Side, where she had been a teacher and mentor for decades, held a memorial for her in the school auditorium. The program was very structured, with a limited number of speakers so as to fit in a limited time frame. So many friends from Yale who knew her much better than I did were there, and would have loved to have spoken, and/or performed in tribute to her.
But for some reason, I was chosen to represent Sage’s Yale days and friends. The following is what I wrote and read that night. I still tear up by the time I get to the end, but I managed to get through it. For what it’s worth, our remarks were supposed to be only two or three minutes each. EVERYONE spoke longer than that, and no one complained. It was a night of tears and laughter as we remembered a wonderful family member, friend. teacher and colleague.
We will always love you, Sage, and miss you terribly.
My Beloved Friend, Sage Sevilla
When I arrived at the Yale campus in the fall of 1973, I was a quiet and very shy 18 year old who soon realized that I was alone in a place that was in many ways, totally alien to what I had known before. I was from a small upstate NY village with 32 people in my high school graduating class. I also had never been away from my family for more than a few weeks and now had no contact with them outside of a phone line that in the Dark Ages of my youth, charged mightily for long distance calls at certain hours of the day. I couldn’t just call Mom and home was 4 hours away by car.
Walking through Old Campus I realized that in this square block of dorms, classrooms and houses of worship lived more people than the entire population of my town of 400 souls. I was no longer in a place where everyone was local, with similar backgrounds and economic status, but in a multi-cultural collection of nations, ethnicities, backgrounds, economic levels and geographic locations. I wasn’t in Gilbertsville anymore.
It was both humbling and a bit scary. Then I met Sage.
I don’t remember exactly when we met that freshman year, but I distinctly remember having a lengthy conversation with her on the Old Campus in front of Wright Hall sometime that first fall. My fellow quiet, shy person radar identified her as one of my people. It’s always easier to talk to people who have a similar personality type, especially if you are shy and introverted, because you don’t have to be worried that they are going to overwhelm you, whether it’s done consciously or not. Yale was a haven for overwhelming personalities.
I may have been carrying my guitar case with me because we immediately began talking about music. I learned that she graduated from NYC’s famous High School of Music and Art, was from a musical family. Her mother was an accomplished pianist, her father a pastor. Her brother was a professional drummer, her sister was a singer, she was a singer/songwriter and instrumentalist. Sage breathed and exuded music with notes fluttering around her like butterflies. We’ve been friends ever since.
I was a music major my first two years at Yale. I was never able to catch up with student musicians like Sage who matriculated through a specialized high school that gave them a solid background in music theory, composition and other skills. I had taken piano lessons from a little old lady in the village and was a school band and chorus member, a choir member at church, and could read music, but had a rudimentary knowledge of music theory. I was always a bit freewheeling and undisciplined in my interpretation of what was written on the page. Theory classes at Yale kicked my butt big time and took much of the joy out of my love of music, so I changed majors after two years.
Sage was in several of my music classes during those two years. In my junior and senior years we were both Afro-American Studies majors, which at the time was a new, multi-discipline major and we saw each other and often sat together in classes. Both of us had a concentration in music. But other that, I didn’t see her around very often. I later learned that she didn’t socialize much, and was a very private person. I didn’t really socialize that much either, and lived in the library, so who was I to judge?
I really got to know Sage well after graduation. She took a year off before graduating, but by the late 70s and early 80s we were both in NYC and became closer. I was privately studying voice and taking classes and workshops in opera while working in the fashion industry. I met her sister Caterina during those years, we had the same voice teacher for a while. Caty and I performed together and became friends, as well.
In 1987 I was hired by a designer named Kein Cross to do some hand sewing on scarves. That introduction led to a partnership with the two of us starting a company called Cross and Spellen, designing women’s clothing. We needed a model to be photographed in our clothing and the first and only person I thought of was Sage. The woman was beautiful and had a serenity and etherealness that made everything she put on look better than it was. Kein and I were only in business for about five years, but Sage was our muse and only model the entire time.
During that time, she got married and her blended family grew. Gian and his brothers and sisters were still kids when she was modeling for us. I’m sorry to say that I haven’t seen them in decades and I’m so glad they grew up to be kind and wonderful people, just like her.
Over the years, I would see Sage from time to time, mostly at musical events where classmate Nat Adderly Jr. was playing with his jazz ensemble. I’m not the greatest at keeping in touch with people, but we continued to have phone calls for years, with one of those friendships that just picks up where you left off the next time you speak, there is no need to reacquaint, the bond is always there.
After COVID and our 45th college reunion, another classmate, Phoebe Tree, began monthly get-togethers for Yale friends thanks to the blessing and curse that is Zoom, which inspired Sage to organize a group of people who wanted to write or otherwise chronicle their Yale years and experiences, especially as students of color in the 1970s. Both groups were great and friendships were both renewed and new friends made.
We shared some powerful stories and were just talking about what we were going to do with them when Sage got sick and cancelled meetings. Most of us had no idea she was terminally ill and are still getting over how quickly she left us. Her passing left a void that will always remain.
I believe in heaven. I believe in a loving God who now holds Sage safe and without pain in his arms. I believe that her own faith, which was the source of much of that ethereal serenity, prepared her for that love and peace. She is missed, terribly missed, but we have been blessed to have had her among us, spreading her joy, her love and her music to us all. Thank you Sage, with tears, but with much love and gratitude for your presence in my life.
What a wonderful remembrance! Her memory will always be a blessing.