Not To Get all Deathy on You, Part Two
July 14, 2008
Last week, I explained how July is a strange month in my world, due to the deaths of three women who were very inspiring to me. Today, I’ll tell you about the second.
Seventeen years ago today, my best friend Karen got into a car accident. She’d gone to get nachos at 7-11, and for some reason drifted over the center line, into a head on collision. The other driver broke their leg, but they were OK. Karen wasn’t.
There were lots of theories…maybe she was changing the cassette, maybe the nachos fell and she was afraid of a mess in her stepmom’s Volvo wagon. But no one ever knew what really happened, as she was alone and never woke back up.
This marks the first year she’s been dead longer than alive.
I can honestly say that over the past seventeen years, she pops into my thoughts most days. Maybe because I live on the road where she had the accident, and I pass the spot where she crashed on the school run every day. I always still look for the skid marks, although I know the road’s been re-paved many times now.
I mark Karen by what would have been. She wanted to be an actress, and when we were in high school had done commercials and been an extra in a movie. She was beautiful in a very unique way…deep blond, wavy hair, and eyes such a pale blue they could appear translucent. And a deep dimple on the left side that appeared when she laughed, which was all the time.
She was ridiculously, insanely, inappropriately funny. You couldn’t go to restaurants with her, you’d get kicked out when she squirted creamers on you while screaming some kung-fu mumbo jumbo. Once she chased my younger brother around the house in a bra, demanding he judge whose breasts were larger. (He was like 13, and SO STOKED. But he kept saying, quite appropriately, “I can’t judge my sister’s tits!” Thanks, bro.)
But Karen wasn’t all laughs. She got in a bit of hot water at school, as she wouldn’t stand for the Pledge of Allegiance. “I’m a global citizen,” she coolly informed the principal, who was unimpressed. She started our school’s first chapter of Amnesty International, and was a vegetarian before it was cool. And as a friend, she was unstoppable.
My horrendous adolescent phase peaked at 15, when I did something really stupid that landed me in the hospital. All right, that’s too vague. I drank paint thinner at a party, and it wasn’t to get drunk. She showed up at the hospital the next morning with donuts, balloons, and jigsaw puzzles. She frowned at me.
“You dumbass. Why the hell would you want to die?”
“I don’t know,” I admitted sheepishly. It had seemed like such a good idea the day before.
“Well, you’re not allowed, stupid. You’re going to live if I have to drag you around for the rest of high school. This is just ridiculous.”
I loved that about her. She brooked no nonsense.
Two years after that, I got my driver’s license. But my mom wouldn’t let me drive. She’d been through enough with me that she was terrified. Karen’s Dad came over and held her hand, and they timed us as we went to the grocery store. We had 20 minutes, no more, no less.
“You have to let them go sometimes,” he told my mom gently. “They’ll be OK.”
Except when they’re not. I remember sneaking into her hospital room, two days after the accident. She was alone…I think her family was in the cafeteria. I didn’t really want to see anyone. I wanted to comfort her, as she had me. I was 18, this couldn’t be serious. “Girlfriend in a coma” kept running though my head.
I thought surely, if I said the right words, she would wake up and laugh, flash me that dimple, and do something that would bring nurses running to scold us.
Her head was shaved and swathed in bandages, and her face was swollen from the steroids she’d been given to reduce the swelling in her brain. She looked different then I’d ever seen her, and it was disorienting in a way that drove the truth home. This was serious. I ran away and threw up in the linen closet of the hospital.
A few days after that, her parents turned off life support. I remember when I got the phone call, the inevitability of it. I ‘d known it was going to happen, had been living in suspended animation waiting for it. And now it was true.
So I moved forward, because that’s what you do. You go to the funeral and you’re sad, and then life keeps going on. You’re in college, you get married and have babies, but she doesn’t. And on those occasions, when big, life-changing things happen for me, I think of her. I think of how great she would have been on Broadway, how great she was the last time I saw her on stage as a ghost in Noel Coward’s Blithe Spirit.
I know she would have done everything she set out to do, because that’s how she rolled. And that’s how I try to roll now too, because she can’t. I figure if I get to be alive, the least I can do is try not to be a dumbass.
Miss you, Karen.
Posted in Miscellaneous, Old School, Rock and Roll Mama
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July 14th, 2008 at 11:23 am
Sorry you’re going through all these lame anniversaries, Lindsay.
July 14th, 2008 at 11:40 am
Thanks, BHJ. It does suck a little bit, but it also makes me happy to think about these people, if that makes any sense. It’s almost like an anniversary gives me permission to think about it, when usually I push it out of my head.
July 14th, 2008 at 4:18 pm
Wow, what a moving story. I am so sorry for the loss of your friend. But so glad she was able to influence you in such a profound way.
July 14th, 2008 at 5:19 pm
I can’t even read through this now Linds. I am still so fragile from the loss of my niece, who stopped at Walmart on her way home from work to buy her new husband/soulmate a valentine’s present on 2/13 and never came home. I was just packing for a little getaway this past weekend, pulled out a suitcase i hadn’t used in a bit, and inside was the invitation to their Open House last October. Like your friend, she was one of the most alive and optimistic people I knew. I still think she’s living on her little farm in NJ, that’s the only way I can handle it. She just can’t be gone.
July 14th, 2008 at 7:51 pm
Lindsay – you’ve painted such a beautiful picture of Karen. You don’t get to meet people that you connect with at that level just every day. I’m sorry for your loss. I have a feeling she’s watching over you.
July 15th, 2008 at 9:44 pm
You are a very lucky woman to have had such wonderful people in your life.
So, so sorry. I’m wishing for a very happy August for you!
July 20th, 2008 at 7:27 pm
You know, that took me back a bit. That week was a turning point for me and my outlook on things. I still talk about it when the someone asks why I think the way I do.
She was such a great friend and an even better ‘person’. Thanks.
July 20th, 2008 at 8:59 pm
Wow, now I miss her and I didn’t even know her! That’s the mark of a true storyteller, by the way.
July 21st, 2008 at 1:44 pm
Wow. She sounds like such an amazing person. I got chills reading your story. I can’t help but think of all my friends, I just want to give them all a squeeze.
July 22nd, 2008 at 2:05 am
I Double J, that was such a horrible week, but I’m glad we were all there for each other. That girl had quite a community.
It makes me really happy that you guys got to “know” her a little bit…I know that everyone who knew her still thinks about her, and in that way she’s still here. Thanks so much for sharing her with me.
Binks, I’m so sorry for your loss.
August 3rd, 2008 at 7:24 pm
She sounds like she was amazing.
August 17th, 2008 at 3:29 am
this is a very touching and beautiful post honoring your friend, very awesome you are to keep her alive
September 14th, 2008 at 11:28 pm
I remember that July. I remember her step-mother calling my parents from the hospital the evening of the accident. I remember all those people camping out on my front porch as we tried to work it out in our heads (impromptu group therapy). I remember my parents coming home from the hospital after they took her off the life support. I don’t know why I didn’t go to the hospital to see her. I am kind of glad I didn’t though. One of my most vivid memories of those weeks (was it really weeks that she was in the hospital?) was calling all the teachers and our classmates the day after she died. This was the summer, so some of them were pretty surprised to hear from me that morning out of the blue, the teachers especially. It was difficult to explain why I was calling, so I think I just delivered the news without the usual, “Hi, how are you doing, how is your summer going?” I didn’t really have time to cry during the whole thing, or maybe I was in what they call shock, but I finally did at the funeral. The monk who was officiating said something about Karen being so lively. Right then, I looked over at the urn that contained her ashes and I remember thinking that she couldn’t possibly be in there. That was when it really hit me that something had changed. Karen was just too full of life and dancing around all the time to possibly be stuck in some urn. It just didn’t make sense. It still doesn’t.
December 9th, 2008 at 1:22 am
Hey Lindsay,
Ive always wondered so many things about her accident. Reading you and Genevas posts were just… i dont know. Blew my mind. My dad always said that Alex reminded him of Karen.. and after reading that she really does. I always felt that my sister was my gaurdian angel on my shoulder, and now i know I have two of the most happy, bubbly people watchign over me. Im not going to lie that most made me miss my sister so much.. which is weird because its not that i dont miss her.. its just that i never knew her as much as i should have.. and i wish i could have known her better. If she were here i know she would know how to help me through this with alex. Thanks for your post about her.
<3 Emily
December 10th, 2008 at 12:24 am
Lindsay,
Karen would be proud of you! Look at you, 3 kids and living well! What can I say? I really was moved, thank you for being you!
Blessings to you and yours,
Karen’s Dad
December 10th, 2008 at 2:17 am
Hi Lindsay,
I miss my sister a lot. Thank you for sharing some memories. I know she loved you and all her friends a whole bunch. And Em – she thought you were the bomb, she was so proud of you and Max. My daughters remind me of Karen at times. She’s never far away it seems.
Take care of yourselves,
Jessica