Activist, traveler, musician, and one of the best goddamned writers around, Sera lost the good fight on January 12, 2002 when she drove her truck over the Susquehanna River, turned around and traveled halfway across the southbound side, and leaped into the water. The lives of hundreds of people across the country were dimmed in the following weeks.
Friends tell of her passion for life, an energy and strength of emotion so strong that it also took the form of inner demons. As her friend Sascha puts it, “She struggled for justice and peace wherever she went, but she didn’t know how to treat herself justly or what it was like to be at peace within.”
In her last column in Slug and Lettuce, she wrote: “These days, I’ve been climbing a lot. Bridges, abandoned building, rusty iron structures which serve no obvious purpose except to jump from the past into the immediate. And I am not scared, looking at myself. If anything, I’ll recognize the real truth of who I am.”
And Sascha wrote: “It was obvious from the first time we hung out that Sera wasn’t afraid to feel really strong emotions and dream big dreams. Underneath all the tattoos and attitude, Sera was definitely insecure in a bunch of ways, constantly struggling with her sense of identity and feeling out of place in the world. But the flipside of her insecurity was that she had this brilliance which shined.”