No way I would have been able to write this last night with my emotions running high and running low as they were. One minute I’d be singing one of her songs with my mother, and the next, caught in a funk as I sat in silence, trying not to cry.
As much as I enjoy writing and drawing, singing was my first love. I never took formal lessons, my parents said no and weren’t too fond of me singing at the top of my lungs around the house, which is why the quieter talents were cultivated under the watchful eye of a teacher instead. Even so, every day, I carted that stereo into the bathroom, placed it on the toilet with The Bodyguard soundtrack cassette queued up, and sang my heart out, aiming to mimic every vocal nuance to the best of my ability. I did the same with the The Preacher’s Wife, until it mysteriously vanished.
An hour or so before hearing of Whitney Houston’s passing, I’d been writing in bed, listening to selections from the 1997 version of Rodgers & Hammersteins Cinderella that she starred in with Brandy. Whitney was a constant in my life, her music is frequently rotated in my library.
It really still hasn’t sunk in for me at all. As a child born in the mid-eighties, Whitney was always there, and she was someone whose talent I admired greatly and tried to emulate–albeit I will never be that good–right along with other female singers like Mariah Carey, Aretha Franklin, Monica, Brandy, Aaliyah and Shanice.
Despite everything, we lost a great talent with her passing yesterday. By the children who grew up singing her greatest hits into hairbrushes, water bottles, whatever they could find to double ads a microphone, the adults who can still remember when she first arrived on the music scene, blowing people away with her pipes, the people who loved her and stood by her side through every hardship, she will be missed.
RIP.
