Remembering Rebecca

If the fluffy pink flamingo she placed on top of the cubicle wall separating our desks told me one thing it was that this co-worker was going to be different.

There are lots of things I can say about former 225 assistant managing editor Rebecca Breeden, who we lost to cancer last fall, stories of meetings where our ideas built one on top of the other verbally erasing, scribbling and bouncing suggestions off of each other until we finally had a direction, a mission that neither one of us could have come up with on our own and that no one wanted to abandon.

There were concerts and road trips, quiet lunches, booming Mardi Gras extravaganzas and carpool rides home when my car was in the shop. Things that, looking back on them, seem simple, almost replaceable, but the thing is, they are not.

Rebecca always brainstormed far outside of the box, and as anyone familiar with the Spanish Town Mardi Gras Parade—an event Rebecca presided over as Queen one year—can attest, this talent extended to her choice of social activities as well.

One Saturday, after consistent pep talks about how fun they are, Rebecca and I rode out to a flea market together, my first one. It’s a real hoot, she told me. She was the only person I knew under 60 that used that term for “fun,” and I loved that. We both brought cameras and took pictures of the vendors and their wares. We walked back and forth past the stalls. We scavenged through stuff we didn’t need to buy. We ate food we didn’t need to eat. She was right. It was a hoot. But it was Rebecca who made that flea market fun for me. I’ve never been to another one since. It just wouldn’t feel right.

Rebecca was such a unique spirit. She was always game. I cast her in two short films I made, in one as an overly involved waitress adding awkward fuel to a first date, and in the other, she played herself for a collection of video portraits on young creatives in Baton Rouge.

And then she wasn’t in Baton Rouge anymore. She told me she was moving to New York City, and I asked her what she wanted to do. She said she felt it was something she had to do. She hoped to live there for a few years then return and get into politics, maybe run for state representative or a Metro Council seat, she said. Why would you ever want to do that, I asked. I don’t know, I just kind of want to make a difference, she told me.

While she was still in New York working on the 9/11 Memorial, and before her diagnosis, she told me she was working on her first novel—the first of many.

There was more to do.

Now, that stuffed flamingo says other things to me, of course. Things Rebecca probably would have said. Things she was able to live out in her too short life. Be kind. Be yourself. And be it boldly.

Though we worked together for three years, there were a lot of people who spent more significant time with Rebecca than I did. And yet, I feel like I knew her as well as anyone. Maybe that’s because it never takes long to recognize courage or gentleness or true joy. In sickness and in health, Rebecca was all three every single day, and she is greatly missed.