Some sad girls are born, some sad girls are made

on the 7th anniversary of my sister's death, I consider the late rapper Chynna and pink Laffy Taffy

Chynna Rogers was a very sad girl. Not the kind of e-girl sadness absorbed through AirPods Max frequencies and Starface patch adhesive and books about other people’s existential dread. But a fetal sadness that never detaches when the umbilical cord is cut, that sits heavy in the abdomen of each day. Real Philly shit.

I wonder if the model scouts who signed Chynna to Ford at 14 could see that. If they saw pain behind those big, bright eyes waiting in line for Kingda Ka and heard the cartoon ca-ching of a cash register. Fashion is ephemeral, snatches up the fatal beauties who match its vibe. Sex sells; death goes gangbusters.

Chynna’s modeling career was short-lived, anyway, because no true artist can outrun their fate. She had wanted to get into the business side of music. But when A$AP Yams, who, himself, is better remembered for dying than living, heard her rap, it was game over. Get this girl in the studio.

Listening to Chynna on the train the other day, I thought, here is someone who was born sad. You didn’t need to know she was an addict to know she was an addict. Dragon chasers speak in a dull crackle, always choking on a little air. It gave Chynna’s delivery this feeling of falling. Like you, the listener, were coming down the elevator to a scene so banal in its depravity: Northwest Philly. Fake blues on a sagging couch illuminated by a single lightbulb, a pitbull barking in the alley. Slump. You know the slump. Everyone in the slump disappears. Some never make it back.

I was born happy. Cleaning the bar on Sunday mornings instead of going to church, searching for loose bills so I could buy school clothes. My life was sticky and infested and bruised but nothing could dim my light.

I don’t need to tell you how Chynna died. Just know that her legacy is my curse. That I was born happy and life made me sad.

My daughter’s middle name is Dawn to honor my late sister. Today is the seven-year anniversary of her passing. Cells multiplied in every tiny corner of her 80-lb body. Cancer of the cervix became a growth on her hip, on her bicep, on her spine. The big guy, the grim reaper, he lived in her lungs.

One ordinary day—(because you’re never doing anything remarkable when your life falls apart. Unraveling is the baseline; things working out is extraordinary.)—while I was eating sweetbreads and drinking spritzes with colleagues at a Northern Italian steakhouse, the grim reaper broke loose, and Dawn choked to death on her own blood. In front of her son. You didn’t need to read that but I needed to write it. I’m stuck in the hot throat of August until I say those words and make myself remember. Let August hawk me like a loogie into September.

Seven years isn’t that long. Still in the single digits. Plus, I’ve lost plenty more people since then. Like I said, cursed. Thus my sadness, relatively speaking, is quite new. And I’m still learning what to do with it—what it likes to eat, its favorite candles, whether it feels most at home at the beach or in the mountains.

Now that I have a daughter, I’m determined to tame the wild thing that it is, my sadness, and live with it in a way that feels freeing for us all. That does not obscure the truth of my life but finds greater meaning in the here and now, with her. The present is all we’ve got, after all. I learned that the hard way.

My family and I went down to the beach one afternoon a few weeks ago. I popped into a candy store for some saltwater taffy. Dawn almost exclusively ate Laffy Taffy at the end of her life. The pink kind with sparkles. On the way home I sat in the backseat beside my daughter, picking the bits out of my teeth, wondering how the hell she ate this stuff.

Dawn Marie Becker 12/21/87-8/27/18