Considering How Our Light Is Spent

I used to know this girl. This girl.

Not well, I suppose: I was working at the College while she was there, and I used to help her out, here and there. When I could. Whether I felt like it or not.

Katie's life was extraordinary, and her death mundane: the only surprise was that it did not come sooner. The Great and the Good are already offering their encomia, but I am neither—neither as good as I should be, or as great as I would wish. I have my own pettiness and bitterness to deal with. I am diffuse, my accomplishments vague. Lacking the unenviable adversities arrayed against Katie, I lack also her enviable singularity of focus.

What I know of Katie Lynch is this: she had to fight for everything she ever got. Sometimes she did it with charm, sometimes with hectoring, sometimes with that effortless moral bullying that the crippled can practice on the able-bodied—but mostly with sheer bloody-minded determination. She never asked: she always insisted. Because that's How Things Had To Be.

In the summer before she started classes, the College, knowing she was coming, spent a great deal of money—money we really could not spare from the operating budget—to bring the campus facilities up to ADA code. There was never the slightest question of not doing so. It was How Things Had To Be.

My meomories of Katie mostly don't have Katie in them at all. They are largely memories of sitting alone in my office with the door closed, reading aloud into a tape recorder. In her last years at the College, Katie tired more and more easily—she had a difficult time sitting up to read, and relied more and more upon audiotapes. Some of her tapes were provided by the Massachusetts Commission for the Blind, but these she loathed; much of the reading, she told me, was done by prisoners (community service, you see), and she found their performances intolerable. Student readers and a couple of other folks on staff helped pick up the slack, but I (for whatever reason) was her reader of choice. My job description was "audio-visual services." Indisputably, this was my purview.

And so my memories of Katie Lynch are my memories of the books I read for her. To her. Through her. The Four Quartets of T.S. Eliot, F. Scott Fitzgerald's strange and beautiful story "The Ice Palace," the sexually-obsessive sonnets of Louise Labé, Maryse Condé's Crossing the Mangrove, great swathes of feminist theory, the City of Ladies, and God knows what all else—most of which I had not read in years, or ever. I remember the strange satisfaction of having an audience, of switching on the recorder and murmuring, "Hello, Katie," into the microphone: "When we left off on the last tape..."

I remember giving and receiving at the same time, in the same action—that what I got back, I had not had before I gave it away; in sprang into existence twofold from nothing.

I had not seen Katie in nearly three years, and my memories of her are of time spent alone with great books. Does that dishonor her? I do not know. But I am grateful to her for the opportunity, and for her example.