By: Cameron MacKenzie
About two months ago, my friend died. She was a little past 50. She was diagnosed with cancer in December and gone by September. She was a beloved professor, a damn fine poet, and a mother to four children. I've been trying to figure out how to talk about her, in public and in private, because while I adored her, I struggle to understand how she lived her life.
She was always exhausted. She was constantly overwhelmed with family, friends and work, and she was deeply anxious about money. Every day she gave away her time and attention and energy, and while I think it took an enormous toll on her personally, she – and I'm not kidding about this – made the world a better place. In this small corner of the country, everyone knew who she was. She was immensely respected. She guided writers through endless drafts and revisions. She inspired countless students. She deepened the faith of those with whom she went to church. And I know all of this because at the memorial service for her a few weeks ago, the nave was packed with hundreds of people who loved her. But what is the price of that kind of love?
She made the world a wonderful place, and she drove herself into the ground doing it. When we talked about these sorts of things she seemed, at times, resigned to her fate. Never enough money or time or space. This was not, I could tell, how she'd imagined her life would have gone.
When she was young she modeled in New York. Her first book of poetry was a finalist for the Yale Younger Poets Series. You win that award and your life changes. She didn't win. She got pregnant, and she moved back to her little hometown to try and teach at the local college, but the college wasn't hiring. She couldn't make the two-hour commute to another college because she had kids in daycare, but she desperately wanted all of them to go to school – something she couldn't afford unless she got a full-time job in higher ed. "I'll work in the mailroom," I remember her shouting to me over the phone. "I'll be the most overqualified clerk in the history of time, I don't care!"
She was intimidatingly intelligent, and so damn intense I could watch her restrain herself from physically attacking ungenerous people, careless people, ignorant people. We would trade writing and, if she wasn't careful, she could eviscerate my work until it was just a limp mass of shreds in her hands. All of this and more is why, I think, she chose to throw herself into her community.
When she finally got that job at the college, she counseled her students for hours on their writing. She was the same with her reading group, her writing group, her church, and of course her family. She was everything to everyone in an attempt, I believe, to channel all of this raw power toward something lasting, and something good. I think she gave and gave because if she didn't, she wasn't comfortable with what all of that energy would do in her own hands alone.
I've never watched an artist die. I think it's different from the deaths of other people. The preciousness of life was one of my friend's dominant themes. She spoke it into existence repeatedly in her work. She gave shape to it, and she helped other people imagine it. When somebody like that dies, it's like a maker has become unmade, or a maker has become her work. It's like she already told us how to understand her life, and her death as well. Maybe that's right.
Should she have stopped writing? Left academia? Or should she have stayed in the city and lived the bohemian life she wanted? Or is that what she wanted at all?
When I think of my friend now I'm reminded of two things. One is a review I wrote for a magazine she was editing. It was a shitty review – I didn't like the book – and she wouldn't take it. She sat me down at a picnic table outside a coffee shop to let me know she was serious. "There's enough of this in the world," she said, shaking my paper at me. "More than enough. You don't like this book? Fine. Go find one you do, and tell us about that."
And the other thing I think of is one of her poems – I'll just give you the last two stanzas. It's surreal to read now. It seems, like all great work does, to be both personal and universal; to speak the truth of a life as well as the truth of the life we're all living right now. I ask myself what my friend knew then, and how that helped her make sense of every day. Who was this person who could tell us who we were? And what can we still learn from her about how to spend the time we have left?
Come to my house…We will speak
of aqueducts and whiskers, we will eat
brown bread and touch our feet under the table.
You can tell me we are not connected,
that there is nothing out there holding us together.
I will tug your ear, and peck you softly on the lips.
I miss you Mary.
Opinions expressed here are those of the author and not necessarily those of Osaic Wealth, Inc.