Bravery.

Several years ago, looking for inspiration in the reading and writing world, as well as constructive ways to fill some of my evenings, I got on a kick where I would attend book readings.  Often going directly from work I would make plans to head to least one reading a week somewhere in the city.  Some weeks I'd plan for two readings, maybe even three.  Occasionally I would met up with a friend at the reading, having emailed them earlier to suggest the event, knowing they'd read the book or loved the author.  Most of the time though, I went to these readings alone.  I came to quickly love the nights I trekked to whatever independent book store was hosting the event, on my own, as I soon began to think of these readings as a date night for myself.  Particularly because I quickly fell into a rather pleasant pattern - I always gave myself the "gift" of buying whichever book was being read from or discussed that evening and I almost always treated myself to dinner or, at the very least, an ice cream cone, on my way home.

Schedules change and nights fill up with various other activities and my non-stop live reading/book circuit has slowed down in recent years.  I still go, of course, but I tend to pick and choose a bit more selectively now regarding which authors I decide I must see.

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Tonight, I attended a book event that I knew I wouldn't, couldn't, miss the minute I read about it in the bookstore's newsletter.
 
A collection of fiction and nonfiction essays, written by Marina Keegan, a talent on the rise and Yale graduate who died in a car crash mere days after her college graduation in 2012 has been published posthumously.  I wrote about Marina mere days after her death two years ago, when I, along with countless others were first discovering her essay, The Opposite of Loneliness, and her heartbreaking story of a spirit and voice cut short from this world far too soon. 

I went to the reading tonight simply because Marina's story has stayed very close to my heart over the past two years.  Long after the media blitz faded, past the point of time when the Keegan family's heartbreak was front page news, I have thought of this young woman.  I've thought of her - this stranger I never knew personally, this woman I doubt I would have ever known had there been no car accident - when I step out into the hushed city streets after a snowfall.  Or when I'm driving alone late at night and I start singing aloud to a favorite tune at the top of my lungs.  She pops into my mind when I read a great book, one I am so grateful to have spent time with, or when I linger over a glass of wine with an old friend, both of us holding our sides after laughing too long about what, we don't even know.  I think of her when I have a great day at work, when I accomplish a goal in my job I'd been working toward.  I think of her when I step outside of my comfort zone, when, despite my nervousness or apprehension, I remember her words:  We can't, we MUST not lose this sense of possibility because in the end, it's all we have. 

And when I think of Marina, I find that I often think back to my own life at 22.  I have a photograph, framed in a silver and red Boston University frame, that was taken on my own graduation day years ago, standing in line with some of my closest college friends, all of us waiting for our diplomas.  Thanks to limited shelf space in a one bedroom apartment, the frame and picture aren't displayed on my bookshelves anymore.  Instead I've tucked the picture into a box along with other old photographs and frames that I store under my bed.  Once in awhile, though, particularly if I'm feeling nostalgic, I dig it out and study it anew.  I stare at our faces.  Me.  My friend Bob, who would move to Los Angeles that summer, who still lives there, now with a wife and son.  My friend Mark, the only person taller than me in that photo, grinning as wide as he could, his hand resting on his girlfriend's, who would become his wife, then ex-wife's shoulder.  Anthony, with his glasses on, pointing two fingers at the camera like a macho man, ready to tackle the world. 

While I have no real desire (at all) to relive my college days, or really even my early twenties, I do think, when I look at that photograph now, some thirteen years later, that we were so young.  With nothing but life in front of us. 

"We're so young. We're so young.  We're twenty-two years old. We have so much time." 

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The reading tonight was led by Anne Fadiman, Marina's mentor at Yale.  After I'd taken a seat but before the event got underway, I watched the crowd that had gathered around the table set up with food and wine.  There were Marina's parents, I realized; faces I recognized from when the news of Marina's death first hit the newsstands.  I sat there, on my metal folding chair, watching her father shake hands with people and then, five minutes before the event was to begin, step away from the crowd, put his reading glasses on and look to his handwritten notes.  I watched her mother, a beauty I remembered from the now famous photograph of Marina standing with her parents on graduation day at Yale, greeting guests.  I saw her mother laugh at something someone said, saw her father tuck his notes back into his breast pocket, watched him greet more attendees with a smile on his face.

How brave, I thought to myself.  How wonderfully brave I find these two strangers to be, who decided that rather than descend into darkness and depression after their daughter's death, that they would, instead, stand up and read from their deceased daughter's work, to answer questions and greet acquaintances as well as strangers, to work to keep Marina's voice alive; to keep on living themselves.

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And I think we are, each and every single one of us, walking around performing acts of bravery.  Certain people make it easier to distinguish acts of heroism, more so than others, but we are all - in big leaps or tiny, small, baby steps - doing something that requires courage, boldness.  Isn't that what it takes to be alive, after all? 

On graduation day, May 2012, Marina told her parents: "I will live for love and the rest will take care of itself."

How smart.  How wise.  How fearless.  How brave.