Coolio’s Passing

Gangsta’s Paradise is a haunting classic

As soon as my husband informed me that Coolio had passed away, we immediately said the opening lines of 1995’s best-selling single Gangsta’s Paradise.

As I walk through the valley of the shadow of death

I take a look at my life and realize there’s nothing left.

I was surprised that my husband could rap most of the lines. Coolio won a bunch of awards in 1996 and that year I turned 23. It felt like he was talking to me when he said, “I’m 23 now, but will I live to see 24? The way things are going, I don’t know.”

I know I listened to that song when my brother was in a coma. I was in law school and it felt like death was all around me. And it’s funny that the Michelle Pfieffer movie was based on my high school.

One of my brother’s teachers at Carlmont High School had written the book Dangerous Minds. But our high school wasn’t located in an inner-city. It was actually a pretty difficult transition for my brother and I to go from a middle-class neighborhood in Torrance, California to the affluent Bay Area. Kids from East Palo Alto were bussed in to Carlmont and I got to mix with African Americans for the first time in my young life.

It wasn’t until my cheerleading team refused to toilet paper the black football players’ homes that I realized that EPA was not a safe area. I couldn’t tell in the day time and I had driven there to pick up teammates. My school’s football team was pretty good and…