Death metal bands in Edmonton don’t want to let the voice of one fan go silent.
Michelle Robinson fought kidney disease for years, documenting her battle in an autobiography. She wrote the final chapter of her life in June.
“Just remember to live, just remember to laugh, just remember to love. Just remember to survive, remember to fight, and remember – you will conquer,” her book concludes.
Through it all, despite hundreds of dialysis appointments and two kidney transplants, Robinson found time for death metal concerts.
She usually stood at the back of the room, sipping water. But when Robinson’s favourite band, Kryosphere, performed she’d walk up to the stage with both hands outstretched in the devil horns sign.
It’s an image her common-law husband, Dave Waram, says he can’t shake. He’s the band’s guitarist.
“Just talking about it puts a lump in my throat,” he said. “I’m destroyed inside…I miss everything about her. Just the cuddles at night and the kisses on her forehead.”
“I miss everything about her,” said Dave Waram about his common-law wife, Michelle Robinson, who died of kidney failure in June 2016. (Supplied/Dave Waram)
Kryosphere broke up about a year ago, Waram said, but started rehearsing again less than a week after Robinson’s death.
They planned one final concert in her honour.
“It’s given all of us an opportunity to grieve and to go through emotions and to try to fill the emptiness that all of us feel,” said bass player Stephanie Bell.
“Her uncanny way to be able to hide her pain and to be able to show nothing but love for life and love for her friends and her family … was inspiring and I will absolutely take that with me forever.”
Kryosphere held a fundraising concert in Edmonton on Friday, alongside other death metal bands. Anyone with an organ donor card got in half price.
The band’s members and fans are trying to raise enough money to get Robinson’s book published.
“The book is finished,” said her sister-in-law, Jennifer Patten-Robinson. “We’re going to add a little epilogue at the end, from the family, to tell people the end of her journey.”
Patten-Robinson described the current copy as a single folder, bursting with double-sided pages of print.
“I think the book is going to help people realize that no matter how bad you think life is, it can always get better.”