The Loss Of Eden Blog

by: Ayesha Adamo
This blog is designed to represent not only the music, but also the personal thoughts, insights, and interests of the members of Loss of Eden.  As such, it seems only appropriate to dedicate my first written entry to someone very important to me in my continued development as an artist and as a person.

Lisa (Letizia) Zindell and Ayesha Adamo: Rockstars

Lisa Zindell.  Letizia Ann Marie Zindell.  Lisa.  The prom queen, the cheerleading captain, the salutatorian, the dance teacher…the DYFS worker, the girl with a Masters Degree in Criminal Justice, the Masters student in Social Work…the daughter, the girlfriend, the fiance, the ex-fiance…

The Friend.

In the summer before fourth grade, Lisa Zindell was my best friend.  We spent nearly every day together – walking to the only  corner deli in our tiny seashore town to get sodas and candies, playing imaginative games  of dress up or pretending to be gypsies in the woods behind my house, going to late afternoon barbeques or learning to dive and do backflips into the in-ground pool at her house….On those long summer walks in our childhood, it seemed like we could talk about anything.  It was one of the first times in my life that I felt I had a true friend.

And then there came a day when she stopped calling.  She didn’t come over anymore, and I was no longer invited to her house either.  I never knew why.  We never spoke about it, but I watched her as she became…the popular girl.  I was still invited to her birthday party the next year.  She traced my creative drawings to put on the invites because sometimes that’s what love is.

There were times when she seemed like the Jacob to my Esau; she was the girl you always wished you were – beautiful, smart, popular, sought-after…included.  Before I went away to school in tenth grade, we shared classes and cheerleading practices, but still there was a distance between us, seemingly insurmountable – a distance necessitated by her position up there in the brilliance of who she was, just a few steps ahead of me on the great ladder – a brilliance that I knew the shape of from being on the outside of it, from not being able to climb up quite as high.  The last time I saw her was on the day she graduated high school and I came to watch.  She was on top of it all.

On August 13, 2009, Lisa was choked and killed by her former fiance, who then killed himself.

For his repeated violations of the restraining order she had filed against him, Lisa’s killer was released on bail for a mere $1500.  In this world that attaches a monetary value to absolutely everything, even the worth of a human being, wasn’t the life of a woman who dedicated her time and efforts to the protection of children and women facing dangers not unlike her own worth more than that?

To read the words of all the people whose lives she touched, whether in her work with DYFS or in teaching dance classes, as a close friend, or just as someone who lit up the high school hallways with her smile, is to know that the girl that I once played dress up with had grown into someone very special.  To lose her as a friend when we were young was one of my first heartbreaks, but the deeper heartbreak still, the very adult heartbreak, is that I never got to know the great woman she was becoming.  I would have loved to have known her.

When I walk back into those woods where we played as children, there is a tiny stream back there that’s almost disappeared by now and trees we used to climb in.  The trees have grown too tall for climbing now, but I  can nearly hear the laughter of the children that we were…somewhere…very high up in the brilliance, where the angels were ascending and descending.