Birthdays and Memories

Yesterday would have been my friend Kate’s 30th birthday. November 9th. The day the Berlin Wall came down. That was always the joke in high school. Instead of saying “Happy Birthday, Kate!”, I’d say “Happy day the Berlin Wall came down!” We thought it was funny. I’m not sure why, exactly, it was just one of those things.

Kate died 5 years ago. Just a few weeks before the 2008 elections. She was one of my fellow Hillary-girls during the primaries. I think she even met Hillary at one point.

But in mid-October, a few weeks before I was jumping around on the 30 Rock Plaza, celebrating the election of our first black president (despite my initial Hillary affiliation, I got on board with Barack eventually), I was sitting in a church in Columbia, SC, crying harder and for longer than I ever thought possible.

Death is an odd thing. People talk about those who have passed as “being in a better place”, or similar euphemisms designed to make us feel better. And maybe they work for some people, I don’t know. All I know is they don’t work for me. Death sucks. It’s horrifically sad. There’s no way around it in my mind.

Kate was probably one of the nicest people I knew. She didn’t trash talk like most of my friends (and me, let’s face it – I do it to this day). She would laugh at the rest of us bitching about this or that, but she would rarely participate. Mostly she was just plain nice. Whatever negative thoughts she may have had about people, she kept them to herself. I will never be that good of a person.

And smart. She had just graduated from law school and was supposed to clerk for the South Carolina Supreme Court Chief Justice. Who does that? Smart people. That’s who. I remember once, at a gingerbread house party I threw in college, or maybe shortly thereafter, she said she wanted to be the “crazy liberal justice on the Supreme Court.” She may have just made it.

24 year-olds are not supposed to die. They’re just not. Grandparents, yes. It’s still sad, but it’s a different sad. When young people die, you don’t just mourn the person you knew. You mourn the future you never had with that person. And Kate was destined for a pretty damn good future. I would have liked to see it and share it with her.

I’m not a terribly sentimental person in general. But on days like today, I think of Kate. I think of  Kate’s family. I think of her parents, her brother, her sister, and her little niece who never had the privilege of meeting her. And it makes me sad. Some days, life goes on as normal. That’s how we’re designed. We HAVE to move on, we HAVE to live our lives. It’s part of being human. But that doesn’t mean that we don’t sometimes take a break from our daily routine, our day-to-day stresses, minor victories and defeats, and remember.

I don’t really believe in an afterlife. I think when you’re dead, you’re dead. But sometimes I really hope I’m wrong. Because it’d be really great to get to get to say to Kate again, one day, down the line: “Happy day the Berlin Wall came down!”