remembering a lost friend
I met her in early December, 1990. It was one of those days that remains etched into your memory for as long as you live: crisp, bright midwinter, the air as clear as glass. The sun held no warmth, but there was a glow of happiness around my world that day. I had just moved into a huge studio apartment in a magical old house at the crest of a tall hill, down by the end of a secluded cul-de-sac, up above the faerie-haunted Victorian rose garden. She was my next door neighbor. She was the first person I met, that first day at my first apartment of my own ever, and she became my first close woman friend as an adult. She popped out her front door to greet and welcome me, the sweetest human ray of sunshine, an impossibly pretty, chatty, outdoorsy girl--we were instant friends even though we were extremely different people in many ways. It was just inconceivable not to love her, really.
I remember on that first day, she was so happy because she'd just turned 21 and went out for drinks for the first time, AND she'd gotten her braces off at long last. She was thrilled to be able to smile "without looking like a dork." She had a little tabby kitty named Lotta Liu, and her tiny apartment was a gorgeous, romantic jungle--she could make anything grow, anywhere, and she surrounded herself with beautiful plants and pictures and exotic fabrics and bits of intriguing old furniture, even if she herself was always simply the classic tawny California blonde in cycling garb and track shoes.
In retrospect, I can see the sadness in her even then; but she buried it so deeply, it's taken me years to look back and be able to catch it--in the expression that would flash across her face when she thought nobody was looking, the way the bubbly mask would slip and all the light would go out of her eyes.
We were friends; but she was always quicksilver, on the go, out and about. She pushed herself so hard, going to school, working two jobs and overtime, doing massage therapy, clubbing and partying and working out at the gym and biking 50-mile marathons...and racing through overheated, reckless love affairs. It seemed she never stopped moving--in direct contrast to cautious, reclusive me. I got the sense she came to talk to me when she needed quiet time, someone to just listen to her with affection and understanding. In return, she'd encourage me to break out of my shell, cheer me up when I was blue, try to get me out onto my bicycle and teach me the joys of an athletic endorphin high.
Can't say much of that took, back then; but I remember it with such gratitude now. It's in large part thanks to Kat that I'll never be an elderly obese person with all the accompanying health problems; I've implemented her good advice in my own odd way, as best I can. Even now, when I ride my bike, I sometimes remember Kathryn teasing me about my butt--"I exercise night and day and look! Look at this!" (poking her soft little rear) "It's SQUISHY! And yours..you sit around reading all the time, and yours is hard as a rock! ARGH! It's not FAIR!!" and then she'd dissolve into a fit of giggles, pretending to break her finger against my oh-so-fabulous glutes.
She always saw herself--true to her given name--as a feline creature, half-human, half-cat. Throughout her turbulent high school years, she spent long hours in class creating mind-bogglingly intricate, painstakingly colored line drawings of herself and her friends in animal form, all of them strange creatures from myth and dream. The best one, her favorite, she'd framed and kept with her always, wherever she moved. There she was, in the foreground, stretched languorously along the length of a high tree branch, the mysterious Kat-woman, the tigerish features perfectly melded with her own human face, immediately recognizable to the most casual viewer. I loved that picture. How I wish I had it today! I do own one thing she made, from when she was just a girl. During one of her moods, she had decided to throw it out. I made her give it to me. It was a candleholder, glazed pottery in beige and blue, in the shape of a striped snake, curled around itself, two heads rearing up and transforming into blooming flowers to hold the tapers. It's a magical thing. It's here, now, as I write these words....
Let's see...ah, men...men loved her. All of them. All the time. She tore through relationship after relationship with wide-eyed innocence and hopefulness; every time, inevitably, the dream died. She needed to be loved so much, to find someone who would make her feel whole again; and every time, they would let her down in the end, never be able to give her what she so desperately needed. Often, it seemed they'd just wanted her for sex. We never talked about all that. I don't know why. She just never went into it. I would handle things so differently, now. I would talk every failed relationship through from beginning to end. I'd make her milkshakes, I'd make her cocktails, I'd make her coffee, I'd keep her talking till all the pain and hurt drained out like the infection from a wound. I wouldn't let her hide it, bury it deeper and rush on without resting and healing...now.
Back then, I just didn't understand much of anything, in my own life or hers.
But we had great times, she and I, endless afternoons of laughter and gossip and tarot readings and watching movies on her TV, sprawled on her futon. Those days were the best, nestled there within the protective walls of the big old house on the hill.
But she soon moved on, as she always did. I recognize now the red flags of chronic instability, the self-undoing, the denying to herself the safe, well-rooted life that would have supported and stabilized her so much. I stayed on there for years, myself. I was surprised when she kept in touch, surprised and happy. She always came around again.
Finally, in '94, I moved into a cheaper flat down on the avenue, a unique converted warehouse building full of lively atmosphere and deliciously eccentric behavior; there, the only rule was, life must always be expressed as performance art in full dramatic flourish. I soon heard from Kat, and since yet another relationship/apartment/job situation had burned out, she was looking for a new start. I recommended her to the management and she moved in the very next day, right down the hall.
It was the most congenial place she'd probably ever lived, and the most spacious, so she was able to give full reign to her creative energy. She loved to cook, and build things, and decorate; though she was eternally poor and struggling, still she had the knack for creating an enticing, exotic environment on five bucks and a paper clip. I'll never forget what she did with that apartment: from a bare bones loft shell, she created a cozy nirvana, with an enclosed, re-tiled shower, newly varnished floors, a freshly built sleeping loft of professionally constructed quality. Last but not least, she painted. And oh, what she painted--on the vast, empty south wall, an immense, many-leafed tree sprang to life from the richness of her imagination, abloom with flowers and berries and little fat bumblebees, branches stirring with all manner of critters both real and of her own creation, against a summer backdrop of sky and field and faint blue mountains on the faraway horizon.
But the reprieve couldn't last.
One night,in despair, she tried to cut her wrists. I was out of town for the weekend. All I heard was that someone had found her, by sheer luck and chance. It had been no empty 'gesture'. There was no note. She had warned nobody, called no one.
By the time I came home, she was long gone, in hospital, on mandatory 72 hour hold. No visitors were allowed. An older gay man in the building who'd liked her had cleaned her apartment for her. I went by and helped him with the last of it. "There was so much blood," was all he could say, tears in his eyes.
She never came back to the building. Her family packed up her belongings. I had no way to reach her. I asked and asked. In those days before the net, before I learned how to find most anyone, all I could really do was wait for her to get in touch with me.
Through the years, she'd confided a few things in me. She was a survivor of childhood sexual abuse. She told me that much not long after I met her, but only now, 17 years later, have I learned enough in life to fully understand how that early trauma affected her relationships with men and sex, and helped create and nurture her terrible self-loathing and shame. At some point in the mid-90's, I received a painful phone call from her: she confessed to me that she had been bulimic for years. She was weeping uncontrollably and I could barely understand her. To this day, I don't know why she chose that time and method to communicate her agonizing secret to me. Nor do I understand how I managed to reply as I did, but the words just leaped straight from my heart.
I told her "I know. And it's all right. You're not a bad person, and I still love you." I will never forget how stunned she was by my acceptance and understanding, even more by the revelation that she'd never fooled me, and that all along, knowing, I had still been her friend. It hurts to remember the amazement in her voice. It's so terrible that she believed anyone could ever judge her or reject her for her illness. "But it's so disgusting," she kept sobbing, "so dirty and disgusting. How can you not think I'm repulsive and horrible?"
Oh, Kathryn. You break my heart.
She was molested, and she was bulimic, and, eventually she told me, she was bipolar as well. Since her teen years, she had suffered increasingly violent mood shifts; from ecstatic manias to terrifying depressions, her dynamic, impassioned mind never let her really rest and heal. And she kept so much of her suffering all bottled up inside; it ate away at her soul like poison from within, year after year after year.
When she was date-raped in '93, the final downward spiral began. I tried to help her, but I didn't even know then what to do or say...and there was so much she still hid in shame, even from me. I just kept trying to comfort her, trying to make her know that it wasn't her fault, that she'd committed no sin, that there was nothing truly wrong with her, that she was ill, she had problems, just as we all do, but that she was always, always, always a good and beautiful person--not only in my eyes, but in reality.
That bright and sunny day when I looked down at the floor in her apartment and discerned the lingering traces of Kathryn's pure red blood...there rose again in my mind's eye the laughing girl with the aqua eyes like Caribbean water, shining golden hair, soft, glowing, ageless skin and lithe dancer's body.
How could it all have come to this?
And I couldn't find her. I tried again and again. Do you know how many Kathryn/Katherine/Catherine Smiths there are out there, even just in our state? Her father's first name was more unusual; I thought if I could only find him he'd tell me where she was, but for the life of me I could not actually remember his name.
It was three years, maybe four, before she found me again, at the same little folk art store I'd worked off and on since the early 90's. She came in one day around lunchtime, accompanied by her father. She was ill, physically ill, I could see instantly: pale and wan, a little softer around her middle, deep shadows under her eyes. She tried to smile; she hugged me tightly for a long time. She was on heavy meds, she told me, meds that made her spacey and dizzy, interfered with her coordination and balance. They were helping a little, though. We talked for as long as we could before my boss came back from lunch and put an end to our reunion. Then Kat vanished again, and I realized she'd never given me a phone number or address.
Fast forward, to 2001. She called my elderly mother at home, got my number where I was living out east. I had never forgotten about her, I knew she was out there somewhere, but I was going through rough years myself and had no energy to spare for reviving old friendships; it was taking everything I had just to survive myself. On a deeper level, I know, I was living with the fear, the fear that one day, I'd hear the news I never wanted to hear--that Kathryn was gone forever.
But when that unexpectedly hopeful message came from Mum one dreary Sunday, I called the number she gave me immediately. The next afternoon, I drove down to the Bay Area to see Kat again. It was a gray, melancholy day there down by the water where I found her, in a clean little apartment on a quiet street. Lotta Liu was still with her, on a strict diet now as she had grown old and developed a tendency to turn into a fuzzy butterball on legs. I remember the winter light, the flowering vines growing in the kitchen window from Kathryn's roof garden, the aromatic tea she'd made for us, the soft sound of her voice.
She was still so beautiful, but muted now, a sad shadow of that vivid memory-girl, her skin almost without color, her movements slow and listless, the translucent green eyes turned cloud-gray and haunted. No medications had ultimately worked for her. She was a hopeless case. She was profoundly, resignedly depressed. She was also engaged, and said she and her fiance were planning to move to Colorado together. I should've guessed that he was probably as unstable as her; since then, I've seen how many different addresses HE'S had in the last ten years. But I didn't meet him that day. All I knew was that he was being good to her, taking care of her so she could stay home and not have to work so much....which, I also know now--too late--often isn't the best thing for a depressed person. I was happy for her in a way, because she'd started painting again, and even showing her work; she was still the visionary artist who'd created that unforgettable Tree of Life on her apartment wall long ago. She told me the work helped her, and thanked me for always encouraging her to create art; she said I'd been the only one who ever did, really.
It felt like she wanted to say goodbye. I will never forget her words: "something in my brain just doesn't work right and I don't believe it ever will. I just keep trying and trying to get better and it never happens. I'm sick and tired of trying."
That was the last time I ever saw her.
I gather she married the guy; I finally found his name, no wonder I couldn't remember it as it's unusual, one I've never even seen before. They moved to Colorado together...then Reno...on and on. She ended up under her own name again, presumably divorced, living in San Leandro, probably with her father, as he owned a house there. I finally remembered his name, Garth; I'd almost found her, I was so close; but too late.
All I found was her death record. She died in July. She was only 37.
I found the record on the eve of Halloween. A couple of days earlier, I'd attended a ritual for Samhain--the old, pagan name for the holiday. At the climax of the ritual, the priestess led an invocation to the beloved dead. At this time of the year, when the veil between the world of the living and the land of the dead is thinnest, it is considered right and appropriate to meditate on those you have lost, and to tell them how much you loved them.
I sat there, uneasy, disturbed to my core by something that hovered just out of my reach, some knowledge, some sense of a connection missing, a voice unheard. I couldn't participate. I withdrew to the back of the room, and waited for my friends there, numb and hollow, desperate for it all to end so I could make my escape.
Knowing I'd come unprepared, unready.
How did I make it through all the craziness of life, my own depression and confusion and troubles, and Kathryn didn't? What do I have that she did not? Support, I suspect. Understanding. Help. And the ability to reach out for all those things, to believe...faith, somehow, in something, I don't know what. I hope that what she lacked wasn't something I should've tried harder to provide. She held me at arm's length so often, she ran away and hid herself from our friendship many times. Maybe she needed me to push harder, make more of an effort, give her more than I was able, in those years, to give anyone.
But, the knowledge I find hardest to confront and process is this: I felt in my gut all along that she was doomed. If I make myself speak truth, I have to say that I've been expecting to hear about her death for years now. It's never been, she's never been far from my thoughts, not ever. I've probably thought of her daily, actually, on some level or another, for the last five years--though I never talked about it to anyone, except once or twice to an old ex who met her too. He had a habit of creating ruthlessly apt nicknames for people, though he wasn't a cruel person. His nicknames tended to pick up on the darkness in people, the uncomfortable things they didn't want him to see.
He always called her "Suicide Kathryn".
Yes, there it is: I always felt, deep down inside, that there was nothing I could really do to save her. I hate that. I hate it!!! It's so utterly against everything I believe.
I've never had those feelings about myself; no matter how devastating my pain, I always knew that I'd pull through. I just knew! I cannot imagine 'ending it all'. Why could she, how could she?
It makes me wonder, about Fate, destiny, karma, the nature of free will....so many troubling questions arise that I cannot answer. I'm so grateful to have made it this far, and to still find myself buoyed by this inexplicable, indestructible love of life. I wish I'd had another chance to try and share that with her, to give her some of it if I possibly could.
I loved Kat with all my heart. I miss her terribly. I've missed her for so many years and now I know I'll miss her for the rest of my life.
And most of all, I'm just so sad, so overwhelmingly sad for her and her beautiful, irreplaceable lost life. And I'm angry, hopelessly and futilely angry at the monsters who victimized her, stole her innocence, traumatized her body and mind and soul. From the pig of a stepfather who forced himself on her as a child, to the endless line of men who wanted a piece of her magnetism and her beauty and then tossed her aside, to the narcissistic yuppie doctor who took her home after dessert and raped her--I wish death on them all.
Each and every one of them did their little part to help send her to an early death. I hate them. I HATE them.
I conjure up the memory of that bright, funny, effervescent girl I met 17 years ago, I see her clear as day, I hear her goofy laugh, her voice on the phone saying "well, amazin' raisin, it's Rose! hey, girl!" and it's criminal, just fucking criminal that it all came down to this in the bitter end.
I think of her when I read certain lines in an old poem by Yeats, "The Song of Wandering Aengus"...there was always something a little unearthly, a touch of the faerie, about Kat.
"...it had become a glimmering girl
With apple blossom in her hair
Who called me by my name and ran
And faded through the brightening air."
* * * * * * * * * * * * *
Kathryn Iva Smith
Oct. 24th, 1969-July 26th, 2007
May dear Kathryn dwell in joy and peace in the Summerland after all her struggles and sorrows. She was very much loved, and she will never be forgotten. Blessed be.
'You are going home to your home of winter,
To your home of autumn, of spring, and of summer;
You are going home to the Land of the Living.
To the restful haven of the eternal sea.
Peace of the Seven Lights be upon you, beloved,
Peace of the Seven Joys be upon you, beloved,
Peace of the Seven Loves be upon you, beloved,
On the breast of the Mother of Blessings,
In the arms of the Father of Life.'