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.
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