The Opposite of Loneliness Essays and Stories(2)

The summer between her junior and senior years, everything went so well for Marina that she had few occasions to say GAH. She had once papered her bedroom wall with New Yorker covers; now she was interning in the New Yorker’s fiction department, combing its slush pile for hidden gems, and getting published on its book blog. One of her plays was selected for a staged reading at a major theater festival, and she wrote much of another by, as she put it, “clocking in 3 hours (no excuses) every day.”

During that summer Marina also found time to write to her friends and teachers. Having just read an essay in which I’d mentioned the excuses that the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, an inveterate procrastinator, had made for his tardy correspondence, she began one e-mail:

I’m so sorry about the delay in writing to you! The fact of the matter is I’ve taken ill after wearing excessively thin breeches in bad weather—not to mention because of my toothache, insomnia, gout, cough, boils, inflamed eyes, swollen testicles, and raging epistolophobia.

And ended it:

And above all, be at peace with yourself, and a double Blessing to me, who am, my dear Professor, anxiously,

Your fond Student

(She explained in a postscript to a later e-mail: “Since reading those Coleridge letters I’ve become obsessed with these types of signatures. They’re just so GOOD. Like, that moment with the comma before the line break. I love that moment. COLERIDGE! Thank you.”)

But she couldn’t wait to get back to college:

I’m realizing how much I love Yale. With my minutes before sleep preoccupied with The Future for the first time in a while, I’m beginning to regard Yale with a kind of premature nostalgia. I WANT TO TAKE EVERY CLASS IN THE CATALOGUE. I WANT TO SEE EVERY BUILDING. I WANT TO SPEND TIME WITH ALL MY FRIENDS.

And she did, pretty much, flying through her senior year with every pore open, collecting prizes, working as Harold Bloom’s research assistant, acting in two plays and writing a third, serving as president of the Yale College Democrats, helping to organize Occupy Yale, taking the train to New York every Thursday to intern at the Paris Review, lining up a postgraduation job at the New Yorker, writing during every spare minute, falling in love. When a friend who had graduated the previous year asked her permission to show some of her work to his students in Peru, she responded, “Yes to everything!”

*

Five days after Marina graduated magna cum laude, I got an e-mail from another student of mine:

Anne, sorry to bother you this late, but there’s some terrible news that I don’t know if you’ve heard—please call me.

Marina’s boyfriend had been driving her from brunch with her grandmother near Boston to her family’s summer house on Cape Cod to celebrate her father’s fifty-fifth birthday. Her parents were waiting with lobsters and, because Marina had Celiac Disease and couldn’t digest wheat, a homemade gluten-free strawberry shortcake. Her boyfriend, who was neither speeding nor drinking, fell asleep at the wheel. The car hit a guardrail and rolled over twice. Marina was killed. Her boyfriend was unhurt.

Marina’s parents invited him to their house the next day and embraced him. They wrote the state police to ask that no charges of vehicular homicide be brought because “it would break [Marina’s] heart to know her boyfriend would have to suffer more than he already is.” When he went to court, the Keegans accompanied him. The charges were dropped.

At Marina’s memorial service, I had never seen so many young people cry—not just cry, but shake so hard I feared their ribs would break.

Within a week, “The Opposite of Loneliness,” an essay that had appeared in the graduation issue of the Yale Daily News, had been read by more than a million people. “We’re so young. We’re so young,” Marina had written. “We’re twenty-two years old. We have so much time.”

When a young person dies, much of the tragedy lies in her promise: what she would have done. But Marina left what she had already done: an entire body of writing, far more than could fit between these covers. As her parents and friends and I gathered her work, trying to find the most recent version of every story and essay, we knew that none of it was in exactly the form she would have wanted to publish. She was a demon reviser, rewriting and rewriting and rewriting even when everyone else thought something was done. (THERE CAN ALWAYS BE A BETTER THING.) We knew we couldn’t rewrite her work; only she could have done that. Still, every time I reread these nine stories and nine essays, they sound exactly like her, and I don’t want to change a word.

Marina wouldn’t want to be remembered because she’s dead. She would want to be remembered because she’s good.

*

I have seen too many young writers give up because they couldn’t handle the repeated failures their profession threw at them. They had talent, but they lacked determination and resilience. Marina had all three, and that’s why I am certain she would have succeeded.

She once wrote me on the night that Yale’s secret societies—senior social clubs, including Skull and Bones, Scroll and Key, and Book and Snake, that meet in windowless buildings called tombs—tapped their new members. She had not been chosen. “I’m in our WaO room right now actually,” she began. (“WaO” was the acronym for our writing class, Writing about Oneself. Marina joked that the following year its students should continue to meet for DaO, Drinking about Oneself.)