I read this morning of the tragic death this weekend of recent Yale graduate, Mariana Keegan, who will be remembered as an aspiring writer, actress and activist. I would not have known her or felt the incredible loss were it not for this touching and impacting essay written only a week ago for her graduation. Here is a brief excerpt from "The Opposite of Loneliness:"
We don’t have a word for the opposite of loneliness, but if we did, I could say that’s what I want in life. What I’m grateful and thankful to have found at Yale, and what I’m scared of losing when we wake up tomorrow and leave this place.
It’s not quite love and it’s not quite community; it’s just this feeling that there are people, an abundance of people, who are in this together. Who are on your team. When the check is paid and you stay at the table. When it’s four a.m. and no one goes to bed. That night with the guitar. That night we can’t remember. That time we did, we went, we saw, we laughed, we felt.
I recommend you take five minutes out of your day and read the entire essay. You'll be glad you did. You'll appreciate your life - and Mariana Keegan's life - so much more.
Later in the essay she writes: "We’re so young. We’re so young. We’re twenty-two years old. We have so much time." No one could have realized that she had only days to live when she wrote this.
This may be her greatest legacy: to not take life for granted. To not take the connection to one another's lives for granted. To make the most of every moment. Not just to get the most out of life, but to give the most back to life. She wrote about the opposite of loneliness. This is what her life was all about, being connected in loving webs of relationships and friendships.
I belive this story impacts me today so much because on Sunday afternoon I came very close to losing my own 22-year old daughter, Jillian. While riding home with 3 other girlfriends from a wedding in Wyoming, a car sideswiped them in Iowa, driving them into a concrete wall in a construction zone. At 55 miles an hour their car bounced off the wall turning 360 degrees, almost flipping over in the process. It was a miracle no other vehicle hit them and that no one was seriously hurt.
Why did Mary Kay and I receive this miracle of protection while Mariana Keegan's parents, Kevin and Tracy, did not? I don't begin to know the answer. I can't know how Kevin must be feeling, but I can barely begin to feel the empathy of one dad to another as I write this blog through my own tears.
What I do know is this. None of us know about our tomorrows. I plan on loving in my todays as if there were no tomorrows. And the next time I see Jillian? I plan on giving her an extra long hug.
