By: Mary Tallon
The images of that night have been crystallized in my memory. The sky was pitch black as I pulled up to the house to see how Abby was doing and pay my respects. The air was stale and weighed down with miserable emptiness. The world seemed to be moving in slow motion. It was the kind of night that shapes a lifetime. The eerily peaceful house was surrounded by a group of silent zombies with vacant stares and tear soaked faces. Death had been there earlier. From the pain paralyzing those assembled, I gathered Death to be a very rude guest, indeed. Death didn't call ahead. Death didn't knock on the door. Death just barged right into my life, all our lives, and took Kathi away like he owns the place. I suppose that's the most important thing I learned from all of this. Death does own the place.
I parked my car across the street. Abby collapsed with anguish at my car door. I sat there in silence. I knew not what to say, nor what to do. I was relieved when Melissa embraced her a few feet away from the car so I was finally able to get out and join in the sorrow. We took our places in the street by the makeshift memorial, her car. The Mitsubishi casket was laden with yellow roses and was a rich dark color as black as the void in our souls. Abby and a friend of Kathi's I didn't know traded stories of happier times. Tales of pranks involving Backstreet Boys posters strategically placed in the living rooms of young men who hated the group, a failed attempt at operating a manual transmission, and a convenience store money exchange mishap. I hadn't been there for many of the events but I could picture them well. I knew Kathi had been there, smiling through it all, her face brimming with vitality. That is how I'll choose to remember her, a stark contrast from the pretty corpse at her funeral clutching a yellow rose. That girl's face was frozen in time and showing no expression. It wasn't Kathi.
We marched silently to the local teenage gathering spot, Myers parking lot. Surprisingly, few people were showing typical signs of grief. Still an unspoken bond had magnetically attracted almost a hundred people to the parking lot vigil, including people like me who never really had a reason to be there before. I was offered a can of spray paint but my emotions couldn't form any words fit to display for my peers in electric silver. Pretty soon the fireworks began. Literally. In possibly the strangest phenomena I've ever encountered, several young men gathered their illegal fireworks and proceeded to light them off right there in the parking lot. Some adults would later call the acts immature, insensitive, and idiotic but really they were an act of defiance. They wanted to defy several things. The police. The notion that we should live for the future. Their grief. And most of all, Death. Maybe Death took one of our friends, but it wasn't going to take all of us, at least not yet, without a fight. Or perhaps there was no reason behind the chaotic display. Maybe it's just that an M-80 speaks more bluntly and honestly than any eulogy they could muster with words. I'm not sure if Kathi would've enjoyed a fireworks extravaganza announcing her death. I am fairly certain, however, seeing her friends and classmates give the cops a little trouble for the sake of preserving her memory would've made her smile. That's what she did best.
