Nika "Bubbles" McLaughlin

Bubbles McLaughlin 10.08.2006 - 3.16.2025 Bubbles, aka Nika Bean McLaughlin died peacefully early the morning of Sunday, March 16, 2025, during a re-rewatch of season one of "The Good Place" with her parents Dawn & Stirling. The unjustly brief time we shared with her here on Earth was often hard, typically joyful, and always interesting. She was a loving big sister to Teji, a deep thinker, and a fierce and unyielding advocate for social justice. Bubbles was also an unapologetically weird, dark, and spooky kid. She was and will forever be cooler than any of us. So there is no use trying. Sorry, not sorry. Bubbles has special magical connections with so many given and chosen family members: all her Auntie, Uncle, and Cousin teams and of course her grandparents, Susan "Bubbie", Ed "Grandpa", Jamie "Grammy", and John "Papa John". Always by her side were her beloved feline protectors, Thrasher and Echo. Bubbles was a New Yorker, having spent her early years in Washington Heights. She was a proud lesbian and a senior at Evanston Township High School, focusing on digital art. She hated sports, but loved "RuPaul’s Drag Race". She enjoyed watching horror movies (the "Scream" franchise was her favorite) and baking shows. She was an expert at photoshop. She made her chocolate chip cookies with brown butter. The circumstances of her life were dictated by her illness, and while it unquestionably brought her pain, she was loud and unapologetic about her disability. She loved both Halloween and her family very deeply, and it was often unclear which she loved more. In time we will have more and better words. For now, may her memory be a blessing. Love you all. Friends and family gathered on Thursday, March 20, at Jewish Reconstructionist Congregation, 303 Dodge Ave, Evanston, IL 60202. Doors opened at 1pm, service began 2pm, shiva was on-site from 3-5pm. Guests were asked to what was comfortable and made them feel most like themselves, Bubbles always did! The service may be viewed here: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1DVc6lwCGYVVcC_m3uYCWE5WiAjiQa0PI?usp=sharing In lieu of flowers, the family requests donations in her name to the Proteus Syndrome Foundation: https://www.proteus-syndrome.org/ (a very small and mighty group of parents). Arrangements by Inclusive Funeral Care, 773-318-1305 or www.InclusiveFuneralCare.com. BUBBLES' FAVORITE THINGS: Digital Art, punk stuff, spooky stuff, D&D, Queer stuff, "Stranger Things", Empires SMP, video games, Undertale, Deltarune, Life is Strange, other fandom stuff, Discord (her online friends), My Chemical Romance, Halloween, her kittens Thrasher & Echo, and just cats in general. BUBBLES’ 1ST PERSON ARTIST STATEMENT FOR HER SENIOR A.P. ART SHOWCASE, OPENING APRIL, 2025: As a person with life-long complex disabilities and chronic illness, my art has always been both consciously and unconsciously an exploration of declaring my personal identities AND those things that bring me comfort. It is unfortunately common for children, teens, and even adults with disabilities to be infantilized or talked down to. Feelings of anger and dissociation from the physical and a need for escape are very real. I have always been drawn to punk fashions and imagery. I wear devil horns, add pentagrams and other occult images to my clothes and art… this is one way that I can demonstrate both in my art and style that I am not to be Fucked with. And at the same time, I am someone who NEEDS to find any bit of joy and comfort in accessible ways. When I started to struggle with my swallow, I found some catharsis in binge-watching baking shows, researching recipes (oh, so many opened tabs…) and creating digital drawings of my aspirational baked goods. In my work you’ll see this merger of the dark with the comforting “Who doesn’t love a delicious pop-art donut with cat ears and goth details?” -Dawn Ravine (Mom) My persona itself is a coping mechanism in a way, created to be this representation of the real/idolized version of me, who’s just trapped inside this broken vessel of a body. She is me, the real me to its full realized potential. BUBBLES WAS GIVEN A SPECIAL JOB BY HER 10th GRADE CIVICS TEACHER, THAT OF SHARING A QUOTE TO THE CHAT AT THE START OF EACH CLASS PERIOD, TO BE READ ALOUT TO THE ROOM. THESE ARE THE ONES SHE SAVED: “People ask me, “Have you tried yoga? Kombucha? This special water?” And I don’t have the energy to explain that yes, I’ve tried them. I’ve tried crystals and healing drum circles and prayer and everything. What I want to try is acceptance. I want to see what happens if I can simply accept myself for who I am: battered, broken, hoping for relief, still enduring somehow. I will still take a cure if it’s presented to me, but I am so tired of trying to bargain with the universe for some kind of cure. The price is simply too high to live chasing cures, because in doing so, I’m missing living my life. I know only that in chasing to achieve the person I once was, I will miss the person I have become.” ― Alice Wong, "Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-first Century" “Crip time is time travel. Disability and illness have the power to extract us from linear, progressive time with its normative life stages and cast us into a wormhole of backward and forward acceleration, jerky stops and starts, tedious intervals and abrupt endings. Some of us contend with the impairments of old age while still young; some of us are treated like children no matter how old we get.” ― Alice Wong, "Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-first Century" “What I have found much harder to let go is the memory of my healthier self. With each new symptom, each new impairment, I grieve again for the lost time, the lost years that are now not yet to come. This is not to say that I wish for a cure—not exactly. I wish to be both myself and not-myself, a state of paradoxical longing that I think every person with chronic pain occupies at some point or another. I wish for time to split and allow two paths for my life and that I could move back and forth between them at will.” ― Alice Wong, "Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-first Century" “And sometimes focusing on what you can control is the only way to lessen the pang in your chest when you think about the things you can't.” ― Elizabeth Acevedo, "With the Fire on High" “The world is almost peaceful when you stop trying to understand it.” ― Elizabeth Acevedo, "The Poet X"

Nika "Bubbles" McLaughlin

October 8, 2006 - March 16, 2025