I, for one, will miss you.

I don't care what any of you say, the passing of Tammy Faye leaves the world a little less bright. I don't even know if any of you know this, but I grew up Pentecostal. We went to church three times a week, the church was 45 minutes away and the services were often over 2 hours, and always ended with a full-blown, tears in the aisle alter call. It was a pretty emotional upbringing, centered around sin, of ourselves and the rest of the world.

Needless to say, I also grew up with PTL. It was always on, it seemed. No, we couldn't watch "Three's Company" not just because it displayed two women and one man living together in sin, but also because it insinuated that Jack could be gay. We could always watch Tammy Faye and Jim, though, at home at Heritage USA, as she cried her eyes out, mascara streaks dripping like some kind of living testament to Dali—why bother with a melting clock when you have a melting televangelist right before you, and she can sing, too.

In spite of it all, the drama of it all, the surrealist-without-intending-to-be-surrealist nature of it all, I still had to really like Tammy Faye. She had what could not be taught and what one finds so, so rarely in this age: sincerity. I really believe, to the depth of my heart, that she really meant what she said. So, when she on July 19th, on Larry King, at 65 pounds, said that she genuinely loves us all and genuinely wants to see us all in heaven, I believe it.

And all of that is spite of the tragedies she endured. Jim Bakker embezzled millions from little old ladies sending in their life savings in order to build God's paradise on earth. He was caught in sex scandals…with MEN! I remember how terribly disillusioned we all were in our household as these things played out. Speaking of surrealism, it just couldn't be true! PTL and Jimmy Swaggart having his televised wake for the death of his empire, crying out every last emotion before us must have been why my parents became more moderate with time, and, even, eventually became Methodists. Thank God. Oh, the stories I can tell about growing up a Holy Roller…

But, she endured. When asked on Larry King why she had not, as most fundamentalists had/do, spurned the gay community, ejecting them from church life, and Christianity as a whole, she simply said that as everything played out with PTL's downfall, her people, good "Christian" people would have nothing to do with her, but that the gay community reached out to her with a helping hand. "And I will never forget that," she said. Yeah, that got me teary eyed.

What a neat lady she was. She IS with the Lord now, just as she wanted to be. And I won't forget her; I won't forget her eyelashes, her smile or her message.