I’ve got only a small space in this edition of Lifestyle to say many things about someone I loved. It doesn’t matter, because encyclopaedic volumes wouldn’t be enough to capture the range and talents of Maria McCloy, nor the joy and friendship she brought to so many lives.
Since I heard the news, early on Wednesday morning, I’ve thought that it must all be some big mistake. Maria is gone, and the sentence still refuses to sit properly. It feels grammatically incorrect, as if I’ve misplaced a verb, or forgotten how endings are meant to work.
I keep expecting my phone to buzz, like it did many times a day with her name on it — checking if I had all the information I needed for a story, or whether I was coming to watch her DJ (“Your name’s on the list,” she’d say), or if my visa was in order because we were about to go to some amazing place to cover some amazing story. Sometimes it was just to moan about how people don’t read anymore.
Though our relationship was primarily a working one — we operated in that familiar industry rhythm of proximity and orbit — we really got to know each other last year in New Orleans, covering a South African exhibition in the city. We walked for days, talking constantly, the way you do when you re-establish a great affinity. At one point we passed a fortune teller. I wanted to have my palm read. Maria didn’t — her sister, Natasha, is “the reader” — so she stood to the side, observing, documenting, amused. I was told I’d have a long life. I remember assuming, without thinking, she would too.
That’s the cruelty of this kind of loss — not just the absence, but the theft of assumption. The belief that certain people are fixtures in your future. That you’ll always have time for another conversation, another city, another story.
When I spoke to her this week, about a piece she’d helped bring to life days before, I didn’t register it as anything unusual. Certainly not as our last engagement. I thought I’d keep seeing her name on my phone. That we’d keep sharing ideas, frustrations, enthusiasms — the whole, challenging, wonderful business of making culture matter.
Maria was many things, and somehow none of the labels feel adequate. She was expansive, curious, generous, uncompromising when it counted. She moved easily between worlds — media, music, fashion, art — without ever diluting her point of view. She made and kept spaces for people, ideas, possibilities.
Like Maria, the feelings I have now are difficult to define. Grief arrives unannounced, settles where it pleases, doesn’t take instruction. There’s no neat way to account for absence, only the slow, reluctant understanding that someone who shaped part of your world is no longer in it.
But she is — in the work she championed, the people she lifted and the standards she insisted on.
In this small space, it’s not enough. It can’t be. But it’s what we have.
Goodbye, Maria.
