Kathy

The joy and pain of memory

Hearts and Bones is entirely fiction, but more than anyone else, it was inspired by Kathy. She was my first love. We shared an intense and turbulent relationship during our first and second years of college and remained friends for many years afterward. At twenty-nine, after battling mental illness for nearly a decade, she tragically took her own life. I got the call from her sister, Barbara, when I was in medical school, and it floored me. It still does.

With our boys starting college, it was not surprising that I thought about those years and about Kathy. The writing process began more true-to-life, but unearthing and expressing the memories unfiltered was too painful. I worried about getting things wrong or upsetting her family. The book was never meant to be a memoir, though it gave me new insight and appreciation for those brave souls who write memoirs. In the end, bending her life to fit a fictional character arc felt wrong.

Swapping genders and inventing Peter made it easier—made it possible to write at all. While the book is informed by her, Kathy herself is absent from the novel. The character of Maya is really an amalgam of Erin, me, and others. Peter is mostly invented. Felix is loosely based on a variety of men and women we knew from freshman year. Some supporting characters in the college story more closely resemble real people, but all are modified. The other half of the story, about Maya’s mother struggling with dementia, also draws on real-life experiences. More on that in another post.

Kathy’s sister and I are still in touch all these decades later. I just spoke to her yesterday. She had recently completed a poetry writing workshop at Berkeley. She had never written poetry before and wasn’t sure what to expect. As it turned out, every poem she wrote was about Kathy. It’s heartbreaking to imagine that kind of pain. Suicide is a tragedy for everyone involved. It tears a hole in the lives of those left behind that can never be filled.

Kathy was beautiful and funny and sensitive. Her smile and her laugh were luminous and infectious. She was bright and kind. Delicate in both form and temperament, she had a beguiling fragility about her. She was an artist and photographer, and she used to run along the Charles River on foggy mornings to clear her head. A collector of memories, she pressed dried flowers in her journal beside handwritten poems that moved her. She made me smile, and she made me cry. She was my first love, and she broke my heart.

Kathy fought her illness with everything she had. She tried numerous doctors and drugs and therapies. She battled for her survival, and her family fought with her. But in the end, the pain was too much, and the darkness overcame her.

We were together less than two years when we were eighteen—more than thirty years ago, as I write this—yet I still think about her all the time. May you rest in peace, Kathy.