April 19, 1987. It was one month before college graduation and a day I would never forget. I was student teaching French at Winneshiek High School in Iowa, about a 15 minute drive from the apartment I shared with five other college senior girls. Someone interrupted me telling me Michelle was on the phone with an important phone call. I nearly didn't answer it; one never leaves the classroom for a phone call. But I did go. Michelle told me I needed to come home right away. I can't, I replied. I'm teaching. No. You must come home immediately. Marsha's been in a bad accident. Come home NOW.
I was young and we were all invincible. The words couldn't make meaning right away. But I heard the urgency in Michelle's voice and so I left for home.
In the fifteen minute drive home I had some time to process the brief phone call. It was true that Marsha hadn't come home last night. While not unusual, it could leave room for something to have happened. If the accident were as bad as Michelle's voice implied, then would she, could she die? If she did die, that would be horrible, unthinkable, tragic! But I didn't want to get ahead of myself. I needed to wait and see exactly what was going on. Yet, I remember also thinking, If Marsha does die, then I know she lived her 22 years of life to the fullest. Somehow that was comforting in this surreal moment driving the soulless fields and low hills of Northeastern Iowa.
I don't actually remember the details of what happened when I returned. But somewhere in there someone uttered the words we all dreaded: "Marsha was removed from life support and died at the hospital." She had been involved in a head on accident late at night and had had massive brain injury and other fractures. Had she lived, she would no longer have been the live-loving, piano playing, literature reading, boy crazy, angsty 22 year old that we knew. She would have been a vegetable.
What followed was immediate and unadulterated grief like I had never known and to this day have not known again. I felt a piece of my very soul had been ripped from me. I felt a chasm between the life I had lived and the life I would know thereafter. In that instant, Death became viscerally real. Death knew me and I now knew Death. Two days later the funeral sped by - drinking in the van with friends on the way there, the large crowd of students and church family, a grieving immediate family, a long trip out to a cemetery on a lonely hill that I would never be able to find again. In the weeks that followed I wrote my sorrow and anger and questions in poems. I cried. Friends gathered and talked endlessly about a precious life cut short and all the memories we had acquired. I prayed and found that God was just as grieved as I was and I learned the truth: that accidents do happen and that Fate is not always in control. I looked in the mirror each morning and told myself, "Marsha is dead." It was the only way to begin making a new normal - one in which the world was void of truthful short stories and beer softball, and long blond curls and a devilish smile, and a laugh that told you "Life should be Lived." A new normal where "Desperado" and Bon Jovi and Sharon Olds and Wagner would always make me smile and think "Marsha loved this."
And so began my life without Marsha - a life without my best friend and sister and roommate of four years. A life in which Her life would need to live on in ME. A life in which classical piano music would always make me shiver as her soul would brush up against mine. A life which would challenge me to write better, read more, play and practice more, enjoy more, forgive more, love more. - be MORE because she was no longer here to live it, so some part of me needed to live it for her.
Since April 19, 1987, I've lived falling in love and out of love (more than once), marriage, infertility, adoption. I've lived having a career and a life of travel all over the world. I've lived a life as daughter, sister, lover, friend, wife, and mother. In each case, for each year that I outlive Marsha, I live a piece of it for her, because she didn't get to do it or feel it or see it or become it. And I know her gift to me has been just that, that my life has been made more precious because Death had come and taken hers away on a day I'll never forget.
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