Deborah Lipp

While in Michigan, I learned about the Tempest Smith Foundation.

Tempest Smith was twelve years old when she committed suicide. Her diary indicates that her despair arose from the bullying and harrassment she endured from classmates because she was Pagan. She was a shy girl who dressed in Goth clothing and identified as Wiccan.

Her mother, Denessa Smith, formed TSF to promote religious tolerance and education. Its main activities are speaking engagements, awareness activities (like Tie-Dye for Tolerance) and distribution of literature, as well as interfacing with other charitable organizations.

The Smith family is from Michigan, and Tempest’s suicide rocked the local Pagan community. Everyone at ConVocation seemed deeply touched by Tempest’s tragic death, and there was a great deal of activity and fundraising for TSF at the event. At the end of ConVocation, TSF was named the official charity of ConVocation.

But that’s not what I want to tell you about.

The entire time I was in Michigan, I kept myself distant from the whole TSF thing. I looked at it and thought, ‘These people all know each other, and this is for them. I don’t know anything about this.’ And y’know, that seemed reasonable. I travel all over the U.S. and the world, and every local Pagan community has their thing, and I’m an outsider. So stay an outsider, that’s cool, that’s fine.

Until the last day.

As I was exiting closing ritual, Denessa Smith grabbed me and handed me squares for the quilts that they make (to use as visual reminders in the tolerance events) and asked me to bring them home, decorate them however I liked, and mail them back to her. “Take two”, she said.

(I was really stuck. She had me by the arm. And called me “My Lady.”)

And I said, “Okay, I’ll give one to my son. He’s a teenager…”

Sobs.

Huge. Fucking. Wracking. Sobs.

I was 100% blindsided by this. I had zero emotion about Tempest Smith until I had all the emotion in my body. And with Denessa and I hugging and me still crying I realized that all my stuff about being distant and an outsider and not a part of this charity had nothing to do with anything except my need to stay away from mothers of dead children, from the notion of the hint of the possibility that a mother could lose her teenage child.

So. Yes. Arthur and I will be making quilt squares together.

Oh, and you can donate or get literature.