Sonjia Starling, born James Massa

1983-07-25 to 2026-02-11

 

The summer of 1988 I stopped by my former in-laws to drop off birthday gifts for my son. I hadn’t seen him in almost two years because his mother had disappeared with him. I was surprised to find him there and his grandparents with physical custody. After spending a precious few hours with him, I made the trip back to Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville for my first summer of grad school. I went directly to my studio the next morning and this painting was completed a few hours later. I called it “The Wilderness.” It seemed appropriate at the time.

 

A year later, Melinda and I were married and we had custody of my child. We had married only two months earlier and the single hour in family court was non-eventful. It was afterwards that I introduced James to his new mommy, and he ran to her in joy.

 

That was the beginning of years of trauma, joy, disappointment, and sorrow as we learned the hard way how difficult it is raise a child who was neglected and abused during those critical years from three to five. When you throw in a heavy dose of malnutrition followed by over-feeding as a form of love from his grandparents, parenting becomes anything but easy.

 

Question: How many psychotherapists does it take to change a light bulb?

Answer: Just one, but the light bulb has to really want to change.

 

Sometimes the changes the light bulb makes are contrary to actually changing. This is part of the nature of schizophrenia – committing and maintaining commitment to a single positive change.  When combined with a severe bipolar disorder, it seems to be impossible. Years of bouncing in and it of homelessness and insufficient medication management make it all worse.

 

 Our youngest son, Zach, is seven years younger than his sibling. For years he has actively avoided talking about James, he never accepted her as Sonjia, and his wife and in-laws know very little about her. There was no hate, just bad and sometimes horrible memories, but a few good ones, too. That was evident in the early morning hours of February 11^th when I called Zach and held the phone near to Sonjia’s head so he could say goodbye. You could hear the raw emotion and sadness in his voice. It was all so very real in that moment since Zach had undergone open-heart surgery in mid-November and he was confronting mortality in another very personal way.

 

Sonjia texted me at 9:45 on February 9^th that she was in the hospital with breathing issues. I told her to keep me posted. That was the last I heard from her. The next morning while walking from the parking garage to the Monroe building I got a call from a doctor in Philadelphia telling me a lot of things in a clear and dispassionate voice, a couple of were new to me (ECMO, brain herniation), and that I should get up there as soon as possible to say goodbye. Her brain was swelling after having gone into cardiac arrest and being oxygen deprived for too long. I told him we would be there late that night because Melinda had a surgical consult at UVA that had taken months to get and we would leave after that. By the time that was done and we were home and got Millie to the kennel it was late evening. I drove nonstop to Thomas Jefferson University Hospital in downtown Philly.

 

It had been four years since the last time I saw her, when I had accepted Millie from her and and her partner. They were about to become homeless again and decided to move to Philadelphia where they felt they had more opportunity and more welcoming community from Tyson’s Corner. Prior to that, it had been a few years. Too long to be out of physical proximity with your child. We were always available electronically, to talk or to be an emergency ATM. I had just given them money for the deposit on an apartment so the two could get out of the separate shelters they had been in for a couple of years, as jobs and life seemed to be looking up. But life doesn’t always continue on a straight line.

 

This is all to say that life is too short, too unpredictable, not to say, “I love you”, “call whenever you need”, or “I’m here” to the people in your life. In the last 25 years in Virginia,   I’ve been to too many funerals, given three eulogies for three parents and missed doing a fourth because of brain surgery.

 

It is a general truth that no parent should have to outlive their children. On the other hand, death is not always bad thing. In this case, it is a beginning to the end of a 30 year grieving process and I will be glad to have gone through it. Since I never really knew her as Sonjia, I will remember the little boy playing in is sandbox singing these same lyrics over and over again:

 

“Oh, give me the beat, boys, and free my soul

I wanna get lost in your rock ‘n’ roll and drift away,

Oh, give me the beat, boys, and free my soul

I wanna get lost in your rock ‘n’ roll and drift away,”

            -Drift Away, the Dobie Gray version.