Rest In Peace Cousin Denise 🕊️

Paula T. Renfroe and her beloved cousin Denise Lloyd photographed in Roosevelt, NY. © 2025 Paula T. Renfroe

Each member of the family in his own cell of consciousness, each making his own patchwork quilt of reality – collecting fragments of experience here, pieces of information there. From the tiny impressions gleaned from one another, they created a sense of belonging and tried to make do with
the way they found each other.

—Chapter 2 of Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye

 

Me and Denise at Niagra Falls – the New York side, of course. © 2025 Paula T. Renfroe

 

 

My beautiful first cousin Denise passed away last week. Her Homegoing Celebration is today in Buffalo, New York. And I’m not there. I’m here in Brooklyn, writing through my grief. Grateful that my sister Phyllis, my brother Kenneth, my cousin, Lisa, my Uncle Lee and Denise’s friends and former colleagues are there to honor her life and support our family there—especially her sister, my cousin Gwen and her nephew, my cousin Kenny and his family. Wrestling with the guilt of not just my absence, but my pockets lookin’ like rabbit ears. Not gonna focus on my sadness right now, though. I’ve got a journal for that. And this here is a celebration of life for Debbie Denise Lloyd whose bright smile and warm energy illuminated many a room…. Oh, and the rebirth and renewal of Get Lit with Paula.

 

Get Lit with Paula

People, Places & Things That Light Me Up…
My First Cousin Denise

I took this picture of Denise at a hotel in Tarboro, North Carolina at our Redmond Family Reunion. © 2025 Paula T. Renfroe

It’s strange how dots connect closer when someone you love passes away. For instance, I’m just now realizing that my big cousin Denise played an instrumental role in my reverence for reading… Literature, particularly. Black literature, specifically. You see, I’ve always credited my Mom who’d gift me a Hershey chocolate bar after I’d finished a book for fostering my love for reading. Gave props to Marshall Elementary School in my hometown of Hempstead, New York for the monthly reading contests that rewarded the class that turned in the most book reports with a pizza party. I even did a post on Instagram six years ago crediting Denise for introducing me to Toni Morrison‘s classic and first novel ☛THE BLUEST EYE [pub: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1970]. I remember holding her tattered, well-read paperback so clearly, I can almost smell the slight musk of its wear and tear. But it is just now, in this very moment that I’m fully grasping, had it not been for Denise’s encouragement of my curiosity about this thin and well-worn book with this Black girl adorned in ribbons holding this white, blonde-haired baby doll on its cover—I don’t know when my appetite would have been whet for literature, particularly—Black women’s literature, specifically—for layered characters and complex stories, for intricate themes and storytelling with some depth to it, some weight on it,  and some Black on both sides all through it.

 

Love is never any better than the lover.

 —Claudia MacTeer in Summer, Chapter 11 of
Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye

 

There’s so much more I could say about my beloved Denise, but more importantly, more I wish I’d actually said to her directly. Wish I’d called when I first learned of her illness. Regretting not laying my eyes on her when I found out she was in remission. Denise lived to be 67-years-young.

Confession: I don’t do well with guilt. I remember the author and television personality, Iyanla Vanzant calling guilt a “wasted emotion.” But just ’cause I don’t do well with something, doesn’t mean I don’t experience it. And so I’m using Denise’s jubilant journey to the ancestral plane as inspiration to finally shift Get Lit with Paula from simply a “website for black book lovers and their allies who like their must-reads paired with a nice drink or two” to people, places and things that light me up. I can’t wait to share with you the good folks, the delightful spaces and the simplest, and sometimes complex objects that bring me joy here online, but especially in person. Stay tuned.

In the meantime, please take your time and enjoy some of my favorite photographs of my beloved and beautiful cousin with the biggest and brightest smile. Debbie Denise Lloyd.

I love you all ways, always. ❤️

 

I have only to break into the tightness of a strawberry, and I see summer – its dust and lowering skies.

—Chapter 1 of Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye

 

Beauty was not simply something to behold; it was something one could do. 

—Chapter 3 Autumn of Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye

 

Guileless and without vanity, we were still in love with ourselves then. We felt comfortable in our own skins, enjoyed the news that our senses released to us, admired our dirt, cultivated our scars, and could not comprehend this unworthiness.

—Prologue of Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye

 

It was the first time I knew beautiful. Had imagined it for myself. Beauty was not simply something to behold; it was something one could do.

—Chapter 3 of Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye

Black ♛ Fact: Denise’s mom, my sweet Aunt Mae née Willie Mae Lloyd started our Redmond Family Reunions so that “her girls” living up in Buffalo, would know their cousins from all over the United States. Below is a video I recorded of my Aunt Mae on July 5, 2013 in Maryland. Following the video are just a few family reunion photos featuring my cousin Denise. I love you all ways…always.

 

 

Read Toni Morrison’s ☛THE BLUEST EYE in less than 48 hours while visiting my Aunt Willie Mae in Buffalo, NY during a middle school Thanksgiving break. My cousin Denise loaned me her tattered, dog-eared novel. This ain’t that copy.

— @getlitwithpaula on August 7, 2019

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The Bluest Eye By Toni Morrison Synopsis From Knopf/Doubleday/Vintage International/Penguin Random House:

In Morrison’s acclaimed first novel, Pecola Breedlove—an 11-year-old Black girl in an America whose love for its blond, blue-eyed children can devastate all others—prays for her eyes to turn blue: so that she will be beautiful, so that people will look at her, so that her world will be different. This is the story of the nightmare at the heart of her yearning, and the tragedy of its fulfillment.

 

Two parents can’t raise a child any more than one. You need a whole community – everybody – to raise a child. And the little nuclear family is a paradigm that just doesn’t work. It doesn’t work for white people or for black people. Why are we hanging onto it, I don’t know. It isolates people into little units – people need a larger unit.

However it was over one Thanksgiving break while visiting our family in Buffalo where Denise introduced me tthat I fell in love with a different kind of writing and well, reading.