Every so often you hear a story that you just can’t shake.
It gives you tingles. It follows you around. Somehow, you know it will stay with you forever.
The short, but full, life and tragic death of Marina Keegan is one of those stories. A story of promise that ends in catastrophe, indelible loss and forgiveness.
This is her story.
At just 22, Marina was considered a literary prodigy. She was a published writer and a play she’d authored was set to be produced at the New York Fringe Festival. She had a much sought after staff job at The New Yorker waiting for her.
In May 2012, she graduated with high honours from Yale University. The world was her oyster.
Five days later, she died in a car crash on the way to her boyfriend’s father’s 55th birthday.
The car hit a guardrail and rolled over twice.
Her boyfriend, who had fallen asleep at the wheel – but was not drunk or on drugs – was uninjured in the crash that took Marina’s life.
Marina’s mother, Tracey Keegan, found Marina’s smashed laptop in the wreckage. Her writing was extracted from its hard drive and was posthumously made into a book, which quickly become a bestseller.
In a show of grace and humanity, Marina’s parents immediately forgave her boyfriend, the New York Times reported.
They pleaded that he not be criminally charged over the incident – a circumstance they said that would have broken their daughter’s heart.
Marina’s final essay (and her book’s namesake) ‘The Opposite of Loneliness’ was published the day after her death and quickly went viral.
Here are the highlights:
“We don’t have a word for the opposite of loneliness, but if we did, I could say that’s what I want in life…. It’s not quite love and it’s not quite community; it’s just this feeling that there are people, an abundance of people, who are in this together. Who are on your team. When the check is paid and you stay at the table. When it’s four a.m. and no one goes to bed. That night with the guitar. That night we can’t remember. That time we did, we went, we saw, we laughed, we felt. The hats.”
“More than finding the right job or city or spouse – I’m scared of losing this web we’re in. This elusive, indefinable, opposite of loneliness. This feeling I feel right now…. But let us get one thing straight: the best years of our lives are not behind us. They’re part of us and they are set for repetition as we grow up and move to New York and away from New York and wish we did or didn’t live in New York. I plan on having parties when I’m 30. I plan on having fun when I’m old.”
“We’re so young. We’re so young. We’re twenty-two years old. We have so much time. There’s this sentiment I sometimes sense, creeping in our collective conscious as we lay alone after a party, or pack up our books when we give in and go out – that it is somehow too late. That others are somehow ahead. More accomplished, more specialized. More on the path to somehow saving the world, somehow creating or inventing or improving. That it’s too late now to BEGIN a beginning and we must settle for continuance, for commencement.”
“What we have to remember is that we can still do anything. We can change our minds. We can start over. Get a post-bac or try writing for the first time. The notion that it’s too late to do anything is comical. It’s hilarious. We’re graduating college. We’re so young. We can’t, we MUST not lose this sense of possibility because in the end, it’s all we have”.
Her youthful reflection on life after university is made all the more poignant by the tragedy of her untimely death.
It’s yet another wretched reminder for the rest of us to live life to the full.
Read Marina’s final essay in full here.