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The bible, the word of God, says that “All things work together for the good of those that love God”. I’ve wondered for the last three years what good came from Katie’s death. Was there some wisdom I missed being handed down from the clouds that, had I been looking up at the right time, would have changed my life?
In the interim, I have become a completely different person. I’m unsure whether this change can be attributed to the death of my friend, or simply to career changes and college life. I do know, if she had remained I would be less afraid of highway driving and believe a bit more strongly in providence, but whether the rest of my life would have been any different, I can’t say.
March 28th, 2006, my mother’s birthday, Katie drove her tiny red Oldsmobile into a semi. She had been 18 for three weeks. Her adulthood was fragile, then extinguished. They say she died on impact, her spine snapped in two. I pray to the God I no longer trust that she did not live to realize the scent of burning hair was coming from her own head. I pray she did not scream at the sight of her hands melting. I pray that she did not live to have her flesh burned off her bones.
That night, I will never forget. I had two papers to write for American lit. I think I was somewhere near the end of the second paper, and about three quarters of the way through a stuffed pepper burrito the size of a nerf ball. Jen Essick, a mutual friend from high school, sent me a message online asking if I heard anything about Katie. She directed me to blogs of those that already knew what had happened and asked me if I knew. I was clueless. I had been in a homework fog, disconnected from humanity, for hours. Clearly it was all a joke. The goodbyes and laments meant she was finally going to India. A broken leg, I was sure, explained the RIP PRO postings all over our little internet community. Jen wasn’t as optimistic as I. She called the Prosapios and asked what had happened. When she called me and said, very slowly, like she was talking to a small child, “Sammi, Katie died,” I had no idea what she meant.
About three minutes later, I regretted that greasy, cheese stuffed pepper burrito.
I sat, sobbing, in a muddle of memory and regret on my bedroom floor for about three hours. It still didn’t make sense. I had no idea why I was crying really, I didn’t hurt yet. I didn’t experience anything but profound emptiness. I felt nothing but an intense, unquenchable need for tears. My little sister came into my room, horrified to find me soaked in the wet of my grief and propped against the wall.
She called my mother, who was drunk enough at the time to deny the conversation to this day, to tell her that I was dying of dehydration on my bedroom floor. Jen arrived about twenty minutes later. Sweet girl that she is, she tried desperately to piece me together again. After about 30 minutes she was so stricken at the sight of my unraveling, she had to leave.
I’m unsure who called my boyfriend but in the swirl of those attempting to stem the flow of my tears with the urgency of those threaten by a crack in a powerful damn, he appeared. Although he did not run at the sight of my sorrow, I don’t know that I noticed his presence until he poured me into his car, all patches and spackle, and drove me to the visitation two days later.
The visitation was surreal. All of those faces, people I didn’t know had known her name, people who had treated her badly, whom she had prayed for when they hurt her, people that had been the cause of her self injury and medication, and people that had loved her as much as I did. Her parents, teachers, family, the newspaper staff, half our graduating class: they all showed up to mourn the loss of someone they never cared enough to understand. All of it made me angry. So many premeditatedly sad faces were packed into that room, dabbing the corners of their eyes and gazing at pictures of a person they didn’t know. She was all bubbles and polkadots, every one of them had felt her grace. Not one of them knew who she was. They didn’t know that her strength came from suicide attempts and working at being strong enough to step into the next room. They didn’t want to know that her grace came from loving God and justice so deeply that she donated the money for her prom dress to a fund to combat child prostitution in India. All they knew was her smile and her eccentric beauty.
The funeral was the most painful day of my life. I never saw her body. She had been incinerated, and the casket was mercifully closed. But when they lowered that little girl into the ground, the one I had tried so hard to protect, the part of me that she had helped to grow went with her. All the loving and forgiving, the caring and trusting God, was buried under six feet of dust and marked with a little marble stone. I know she’s disappointed in me for letting something so corporal defeat my spirit. But this is the price I pay to be when she is not. Whether voluntary or accidental, I offered my faith as a sacrifice to her grave marker that day, and fertilized the grass that covers her with the bone ash of forgiveness. And this is the difference. This is the change, the wisdom and the working together for good that I have been given.