Loving Stacey Park Milbern: A Remembrance

My companion stacey park milbern kicked the bucket today, May 19, 2020, on her birthday. I haven’t cried at this point and am overpowered with appreciation for knowing and adoring her. I feel misery and fury yet I won’t focus myself in grieving her. In sharing her work and words here, may we as a whole recollect and observe Stacey.

Development Producer and Crip Precursor

Stacey’s composing was strong and wonderful. Her Facebook posts would reestablish my spirit and one of them moved me such a lot of I requested that Stacey compose a visitor paper in 2019 about crip ancestorship. Furthermore, presently Stacey is one of our incapacitated precursors alongside Mel Baggs, Carrie Ann Lucas, Ing Wong-Ward, Ki’tay Davidson, Laura Hershey, thus numerous others.

Speaking Truth to Power

Last year in light of the willful power shut-offs by the utility PG&E, Stacey and an aggregate of handicapped, fat, more established, strange individuals united together in the Ability To Live crusade
At a vigil and local area meeting in Oakland on October 10, 2019, Stacey gave these comments:

The whole way across the inlet, debilitated individuals are giving shared help to each other. The world probably won’t mind at all in the event that we live or bite the dust however we do.

Impaired eccentric craftsman Alli Yates says crippled intelligence saves lives. Do you recollect last year when nobody could inhale and Cover Oakland scattered a great many veils? That was crafted by crippled individuals as well. We live and adore reliantly. We realize no individual is an island, we want each other to live. Nobody goes about their own dental responsibilities or trims their own hair. We as a whole need support. Ordered progression of what backing is alright to need and what isn’t is simply ableism.

Return home and beware of your neighbors. Rest. There is a great deal to do and taking us all is going. Much obliged to you.

Revolutionary Love and Care

Stacey adored and really focused on individuals furiously and energetically. She took happiness and joy with each discussion and relationship. Her thoughts were really progressive and zeroed in on what’s to come. In a 2017 episode of the Handicap Perceivability web recording on care work by impaired eccentric femmes with Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Stacey shared a portion of her strange crippled femme shrewdness:

…I think a lot of times, individuals with handicaps particularly femme individuals get expected to do a wide range of profound work in return for access support. Furthermore, not seen as related or even something we’re advertising…

…It’s entertaining: My companion, Maddy, posted a photograph of me in the ICU holding my cellphone, and I was planning access support for myself since I was in the ICU, however they weren’t giving me the help that I really wanted, unexpectedly. Thus, I was planning individuals to come be with me at the clinic to ensure I would be alright. Furthermore, it was truly amusing in light of the fact that I would attempt to facilitate their visits to be while I maintained that individuals should meet. In this way, simply that I consider all that is care work, whether that is associating individuals to networks.

…Along these lines, I was simply seeing that individuals, debilitated individuals, we go through so many, I feel like I’ve carried on with such countless lives. Some of them are by decision, and afterward, different plans are not by decision. Like, last year, I gained another handicap, and it’s changing the experience of my body. Also, I think we expect individuals with handicaps just to unobtrusively deal with these advances. That is the way you be a decent incapacitated individual, isn’t discussing your handicap and not disturbing ableist, healthy, capable leaning society or not being a weight. Simply doing everything well and nimbly and all alone. Also, that is simply not the truth of the inability to experience.

I think we need to recognize that there is some grieving and that there is a misfortune and that there additionally is truly can be a few delightful encounters that emerge from it too, very much like anything in nature or life. Furthermore, I think simply naming it, naming becoming crippled or more debilitated as a progress that occurs throughout everyday life and that it very well may be a groundbreaking change or experience is truly significant.