Brenda Littleton - When an Elder Dies

photo by Brenda Starr Light

June 16th, 2025

It’s been over a week since Bobby Furst died, and I’ve been collecting my thoughts on how to provide a small voice of respect for someone important to many as family, and foundational to community as its soul.

   Like many people who posted their memories, Bobby was also one of the first people I met fifteen years ago when I moved to the Mesa. Walking into Furstworld compound 9 pm under a full moon for my first time felt like the return to an ancient home, deeply missed, and so very cherished. In my heart, the meaning “Sanctuary of Humanity” clicked a landing code where instant roots welcomed in all of us, all the time.

   I was not part of the inner tribe of friends or performers, yet I knew there was space for me when I showed up. The last three years I’ve been meaning to drop by with three, large metal bands from a wine keg. Bobby had scratched out a sketch of a chandelier of fairy lights, chunks of my jeweled cholla wands, and these barrel bands, and I wanted to commission him to create the vision. I’m staring at the metal bands now, as I write wondering at the missed opportunity. This morning I ran into Kripa at the JT post office. I saw her sadness even though no words were said.

   I know what Death does to time, the heart, and even though the threshold of cosmic existence is grand in the unknowing, the loss both personal and collective, is true. My work straddles both the personal and the collective. I am familiar with un-named shifts, changes, and rearranges that happen as if we simultaneously walk through, and find a new room surrounding the old space. This then, is the sense of care and curiosity I hold open for Grief, and give blessings to Bobby, and his family.

 “What Happens When an Elder Dies?"

 "When an elder dies, the silence that follows is rarely empty.

   It is an atmosphere, charged, disorienting, into which every remaining voice must suddenly speak in a new register.

   For those of us who found refuge and imagination beneath the corrugated roofs of Bobby Furst’s desert compound, the news feels like the moment a family loses its center pole: roles loosen, tacit agreements drift, and the ground itself seems to tilt.

   Family-systems psychologists caution that when a parent or sibling disappears the pattern must be rewoven, thread by aching thread, even while grief keeps the fingers clumsy. A community, though wider than a bloodline, is equally tender; it, too, is a living ecology of expectations, shared dreams, memories and hopes.

   Bobby was the local hearth, and his fuel was love. He welded scrap into sculpture, turned sheet-metal sheds into galleries, and greeted every new idea with the same invitation: “Get over it, make it happen.” That phrase is equal parts challenge and blessing, and became a corridor through which creatives found their own authority, purpose and voice.

   More than once I watched a traveling talent find their center of magic and exhaled as if they had reached water. Michael Meade reminds us that “the community grows from the giving of the gifts of the people in it” and Bobby gave without hesitation. Meade also warns that when those gifts are not welcomed, “the young people… may burn the village down just to feel the warmth.” Bobby’s compound was the place where those fires were invited, tended, and turned into light for everyone.

   His passing lands with the same epochal thud as I felt when Lennon, Petty, Hendrix, and Joplin left. They were personal to me, in that my life changed from their energy. The same is true with Bobby Furst. Each loss tore open an unimagined vacancy, not because Death was sudden or strange, but because the fabric of daily life had been stitched with their genius and their love.

   So it is here: the ache is not a fear of mortality, but the recognition that Bobby’s particular genius was part of what we called living in the desert.

   Bayo Akomolafe urges that in such moments we “slow down… find comfort in each other, in all the glorious ambiguity that being in community brings.”

   Grief, then, is a communal tempo, a deceleration that allows new constellations of relation to emerge.

   In families, the second-born discovers they can cook; the quiet cousin finds a voice at the table. For us, the community will shift to what is important and what wants to linger. What continues in this new absence?

   Place itself is mourning.

   The Mojave has its own terroir, the specific natural environment of place, a mineral taste that seeps into bone and imagination; Rebecca Solnit writes that “when you give yourself to places, they give you yourself back.” FurstWorld was the Casbah of this exchange, a micro-climate of torch-cut steel and outside sofas where strangers became neighbors. Now the land feels paused, holding its breath, asking who will answer its next invitation.

   Wendell Berry says a viable community is “made up of neighbors who cherish and protect what they have in common," and that community is finally “the mental and spiritual condition of knowing that the place is shared.” Bobby shared so much, all of the time.

   The shock many of us feel is proof of how thoroughly Bobby mentored our courage. If the sorrow feels bottomless, it is only measuring the depth of his imprint. Francis Weller calls grief “a form of praise… the natural way love honors what it misses.

   Praise is exactly what rises now, like heat over the hardpan.

   Solnit observes that crisis poses the question “Who are you? Who are we?” and that answering together can produce mutual aid and belonging. Meade would add that gifts generate community; Berry would remind us that neighbors define each other’s possibilities; Akomolafe would insist we not rush the mystery. Taken together, these voices form the score of a new epoch: one where Bobby’s love becomes our shared practice. He is still mentoring us.

   So we meet, as families do after burial, in kitchens and backyards cluttered with folding chairs. We pass photographs, create social media posts, laugh at half-remembered jokes, and discover that the work of belonging has already begun.

   The desert night feels wider than before, but the stars are the same; only now we must navigate by a constellation that includes one brilliant light newly absent from the visible map.

In that absence lives an invitation.

   If community, as Berry insists, is a shared condition of the spirit, then Bobby has not truly left; he has simply handed us the still-warm tools: rusted, beloved, stamped with love, to keep building the home we first found at his gate, in his smile, in his signs of peace.

   Thank you, Kripa for your hug and for prompting me to include my voice in the tribute for our elder who has died.”

   Narrative Essay Written by Brenda Littleton
   Tin Flea Press (originally appeared on Facebook June 16, 2025)

 
                  Brenda Littleton