At our age, when loss—when real-life pain—intrudes into a community or our individual lives, it’s tough to react without seeming voyeuristic or disingenuous. And when, as in my case, tragedy strikes someone who was once close but is no longer, who has the right to mourn?
Of all the hardships and losses I’ve witnessed—whether individually felt, communally experienced or both—it was the near death of my best childhood friend that dealt the most crushing blow. The slow, natural dissolution of our friendship over the years had been a great loss, but her accident and consequent medical trauma truly shook me to my core because it showed me how much, and for how long, I’d missed her.
Her accident came long after the bonds that held our lives together have dissolved and the organic unity of our childhood camaraderie had split, like a cell undergoing a slow, painful and natural mitosis. Old friends are like that—they are the sadly familiar faces you see in the hallway, the ones that dapple the photographs you wish your mother would take off the mantle, the ones that elicit pangs of regret on graduation night.
At age four, Christina and I were kindred spirits. There were physical similarities: We were both tall, with long hair, impossibly large cheeks and irrepressible energy. We both liked overalls, pink shirts, The Little Mermaid and Tim Nugent. We excelled at dodgeball, drawing and singing.
It was in Christina that I met my creative match, a friend with whom I could fearlessly explore my inspiration for art and music or try out theatrical endeavors. For the near decade that our friendship spanned, Christina and I were a pair—we explored the corners of the Museum of Modern Art (her mother, an artist, brought us every year to see Monet’s “Waterlilies”); and we pushed her guinea pigs through the street in a haphazard parade. When we were bored, we stood on my stoop pretending to be statues or attempted to draw the façade of the building across the way.
In many ways, Christina was a step ahead of me. She, not I, was the true creative force behind our fantastical endeavors. I wanted to dress up as Greek gods, but she wanted to wage the Trojan War with our dolls, still wet with Tempera paint. I wanted to do watercolor, she wanted to recreate a Julian Schnabel painting with her mother’s good plates. Christina’s boundless imagination led us both forward.
But our friendship, the pieces once so perfectly fitted like the puzzles we used to sit over on rainy afternoons, began to fall apart in junior high school. While we still remained committed to our academic interests, Christina’s interests gravitated towards art and theater, mine towards sports and boys, and we slowly took our places in the appropriate social groups. I levied the standard junior high school injustices on her, even though my strain of adolescent girl bitch syndrome tended towards selective inattention to—rather than vigorous persecution of—the decidedly uncool. I cut and dyed my hair, she kept her long, perfectly straight mane. And just thinking of her voice, which was always strangely deep with rich, wavering cadences, brings a chill up my spine.
In high school, when we seemed to reach the equilibrium of casual acquaintance, Christina always felt like a child to me, crystallized in the role she’d played by my side for so long. While I marveled at her accomplishments, I was always struck by what I saw as her lingering carefree nature, her almost intimidating purity of intent. She was removed from my vision for the most part, but when I saw her, I felt a pang of regret. The distance was alienating, but it brought nostalgia for the Christina I had known.
In our painting class senior year, I found myself, as I’d always done, peering over her shoulder marveling—not without the healthy dose of envy that, I guess, had been there ever since the pre-teen block-corner days—at her generous use of vivid color, the uncanny way she could render expressions, motions and moods with the worst brushes and the oldest paint.
We graduated with our small class in 2002. She took off for Dartmouth, I came to Harvard, and her marginal physical presence in my life became non-existent. I saw her briefly last summer—she hesitantly approached me, and we stood somewhat awkwardly for a few minutes, talking about our experiences at college, our interests, our friends. And then I walked away.
In early February, Christina fell into a coma following a skiing accident. While I don’t know the details of her case now, I’ve been told that part of her brain has been damaged, possibly the region that controls language.
When I first heard, I instantly recalled her graceless fall into the pond at the Botanical Gardens, then the time she fell down a flight of stairs in middle school and lay on the marble floor in a sad crumple. Now, I couldn’t imagine that she wouldn’t, couldn’t, rise again so we could dry her soaked jeans in the public bathroom or so I could walk her to the nurse’s office for Band-Aids. How could we not laugh about it later; how was it that she wouldn’t bashfully lean her head sideways and giggle nervously while the nurse applied antiseptic to her wounds?
I also had to come to terms with the fact that the accident, in some way, substantiated the slow process of estrangement that had been underway for years. She was different than she had been as a child. I wasn’t the friend to call the parents. I heard about her ailments—and her slow progress towards some sort of recovery—secondhand. While I can’t imagine my grief is as acute as those of her closer friends and her family, I feel like I now have to mourn twice.
Maybe it says something that, in considering my thoughts about her, I find that the only way to bring this to a close is to revisit Monet and observe, perhaps for the first time, that the colors have changed—have had to change—with time.
Rebecca D. O’Brien ’06 is a history and literature and Near Eastern languages and civilizations concentrator in Kirkland House.
