Remembrances

Yene Lee

Sophomore year I asked you what the point of life was and you told me it was love. I objected: how like you. Love isn't enough to vindicate every long day, people mostly seem little deserving of such a thing; and plus, it's hard. You said no—you wanted to live for love.

Senior year—just a few weeks ago—we were about to graduate. I asked you what you'd do with life and you said you wanted to create; you wanted to make art. You looked serious. "I want to write." I nodded—how like you.

You were a terrible speller.

You wrote brilliantly: the New York Times published you, NPR aired you, and New York put on your play. You'd pound out an essay caffeinated out and days later casually announce the writing prize it had won. When you wrote—hunched over your MacBook somewhere between 12 and 6AM (did your professors ever suspect?)—you'd occasionally look up at our suite. "Yo. How do you spell 'aggrandize'?" Normally you asked only after several right-click battles with Word not recognizing what you were going for. You were a brilliant writer—but you were definately, defanitely, definitely a bad speller.

That's how I want to remember you. You were everything good that everyone's been saying: so talented that you intimidated us, and more creative in your sleep than most people are awake (I defer to the Sufjan Stevens dream). But de mortuis nil nisi bonum captures a shadow of you; you, grey. It isn't you wild, brilliant, and color. Those of us lucky enough to be around as you typed out your genius knew: you couldn't really spell. Those of us lucky enough to be around as you did your everyday also knew: you were human. You were 'impossibly promising'—but you also schadenfreude'd and had fears and insecurities and sometimes you said things that made people sad or mad.

Nobody was more aware of this than you. I went back and reread our emails—pages and pages of collegiate confusion spilled over from late night bunk bed talks or Saybrook dinners that made us late to section:

"I would like very much to become a better person. I'm not sure how self improvement occurs other than true desire. Awake and on my laptop in the middle of the night–I worry that I am in Slytherin. How else could I disrespect... How else could I neglect... How else could I entice...?"

"Articulation is not vindication. I have an immense skill for deprecation and one that I worry excuses my actions to myself and to others. Understanding one's faults do not possibly reverse them – and trivializing my 'sins' is not something that I would believe. Sometimes I do mean things. I often think too highly of myself. It is [these] things that I wish to improve on."

"Do you ever feel like you're a bad person? I feel like I'm a bad person sometimes."

Junior year, we emailed about "human weakness"; you added the parenthetical: "(or perhaps, human uniqueness.)" Yes. That. All those things, all of it together, made you you. Marina Keegan: brilliant writer, terrible speller.

So I want to remember you in your imperfection because that's how you did it. You wanted to write and you wanted to love. So you did them together, with and for human weakness (or perhaps, human uniqueness). "People" are an altogether messy group and sometimes look a little too selfish, petty, or prideful for love. What you decided sophomore year—that you would "live for love"—goes beyond naiveté only after one recognizes this fact and carries on regardless. That's how to get to love—not infatuation, which is pleasant and easy, nor idealization, which is not human.

So you who were no pale shade of perfect wrote for this weak-unique bunch. You wrote your flaws and fears into everything you wrote. And we the lucky readers read along and feel a little less lonely, a little less bad, a little more hopeful. All of this is hard when the one who loves and the one who's loved are both painfully human. You knew this—you knew all this:

"[I] fight away my insecurities with lists I could well add to my resume. This fall I became president of the College democrats and my play was selected for Dramat production. Yet, you're right about the fundamental uselessness of such things. I DO feel most fufilled [sic] and most happy when I am loving and experiencing love from others.

I think my biggest challenge in this regard is my own selfishness."

—yet carried on regardless:

"What happens after or beyond this life is impossible to know, so I will focus my energies and love towards this life and the human race which inhabits it."

That's to say: you wanted to write and you wanted to love. Even despite the strange and still incomprehensible fact that now you do know what's "beyond this life," by age 22, you managed to do what you wanted. Maybe not exactly as you'd envisioned. Like everything else, your corpus is not perfect: the feeling that there ought to be more of it chokes up all of us reading your work now. But it's what you leave us in that characteristic imperfection of human love, which makes us love it all the more. In a way then, still: how like you.

Chloe Sarbib

During our junior year, Marina painted a mural on the wall of her room. She had big aesthetic plans for this room. It was her first room off campus, and therefore the first room on which she could fully impose her personality and taste without fear of University or parental limitations. Because she was sharing the second-floor bedroom with our friend David, she had only two walls for a canvas instead of four, so she made every square inch count. This mural was an epic multimedia undertaking. Marina lined a large section of wall with New Yorker covers laid end to end. She bought paints and swirled sunsets and patterns up towards the ceiling. She bought tinfoil and cupcake wrappers and dotted her new landscape with metallic stars and shapes.

I guess I should say Marina started to paint a mural on the wall of her bedroom, because she never finished. it. It became a running joke in our house: when was Marina going to finish the mural? I'd ask her sometimes what her plans were on a Friday night and she'd grin and say, "Oh, I'm think I'm gonna stay in. Finish the mural, you know." Her palette was a fixture in that room all year: a paper plate covered in half-dried oil paint, brush still stuck in the red or the blue. She always had more cupcake: wrappers on her full bookshelf. Sometimes I'd come home really late from rehearsal for some play or, less often, from the library, and she'd be at the wall, adding some new element. Marina and I went to see Sufjan Stevens in Boston in October of that year. We both loved him with the kind of fangirl abandon that the Backstreet Boys — her first concert — had inspired in her when she was a preteen, and for a week before and after neither of us could talk about anything else. After the concert, Marina returned to the mural and painted a lyric from one of the songs off the album he'd performed, "The Age of Adz." "It's not so impossible," she wrote, big and bold. The quote became the mural's central feature.

I gave Marina such a hard time about that mural. We were friends who showed affection through teasing, and prided ourselves on our wry, self-aware sense of humor. We commented on things. A straightforward and sincere feeling like that —"It's not so impossible" — was kind of asking for it, with us. But there were moments in that year — during "Utility Monster" tech where I felt like I had no idea what I was doing, or during society tap when every junior at Yale questions his or her own worth for a second — when she would just say it to me. "Hey," she'd say, again with a grin. "It's not so impossible." And I could take solace in it. I could let down my snarky guard and process what that really meant.

At the end of the year, the mural was still unfinished. We were stressed about getting our security deposit back on the house, and moving out was chaos. Marina ended up staying up all night on one of the last nights of the Commencement musical to paint the whole thing white again.

So if you go to the room that was Marina's in 39 Lynwood Place, you won't see any trace of the mural, but it's still there: all the colors and the different nights of painting are just a few layers down on those: walls. When I would return to that room during this, my senior, year, my eyes projected the mural for a moment before they adjusted to the room without it. I will remember that room as it was when Marina and the mural lived there. A perpetual work-in-progress, never abandoned and never finished, it's fuelled, without a trace of irony, by the belief that it's not so impossible.

Catherine Osborn

I knew Marina as a friend and as a peer involved in journalism and activism at Yale. I was in a discussion section with her for a political philosophy class we took our sophomore year, in which we were first introduced to a certain ethical problem: the difference in how we respond to suffering based on our proximity to it. It's a thought experiment that has become familiar to many Yale students: If you see a child drowning in a pool in front of you, would you jump in to save him, even if you would ruin a several-hundred-dollar shirt you were wearing? Most people would. If you knew a child were dying in another country whose life could be saved by $10, would you pay the $10 to save him? Most people would not, although they have the chance to every second. What does that say about us as ethical or not ethical actors?

Marina and I had several conversations about this and completed the assignment of writing a short response to the reading. I sort of thought about it and went on with my life, but Marina went on to write this play "Utility Monster" that went up the following year at Yale. The protagonist was a middle-class child obsessed with saving starving children in Africa. In many lines of dialogue, I recognized things Marina and I had said to each other in conversations about this. She had created a poignant and sometimes hilarious universe out of this issue in which audience members could feel membership and question themselves without feeling lectured at.

I've spoken a lot with fellow Yale students about the liberal arts problem: How do you get on a path to something meaningful in the world through the study of the humanities? Marina's work, to me, embodies the answer to that. The point of us all being at college together — in a creative environment that includes more than just writers and artists — is so that we can think and argue about problems in the world and our relationship to them, and in special moments, so that some of us can create universes that engage people in those problems who may not have considered them before. Everyone shouldn't be a writer and an artist, but we need some writers and artists with far-reaching visions.

Making it work in life as a creative person with a general degree is not an easy thing, and something that some people shy away from saying that it is impractical or it doesn't make the most sense. I think the way Marina lived was so instructive because she did not make excuses. A lot of Yale students dabble in different things, hesitant to commit to something publicly until they are confident they can. be successful in it. Marina was comfortable with not knowing. She was figuring it out and imperfect like the rest of us, but because she was honest and present about putting her thoughts and struggling into the public sphere, it felt as if she had already figured it out. I was speaking with one of so many Yale graduates who were looking forward to being creative in New York with Marina in years to come, and we agreed that Marina's way was the courageous way to accept life building it from the ground up instead of having pie-in-the-sky fantasies. Saying, what can you do that makes sense right now, given the resources you have?

Paul Wainer

I came to know Marina through a writing seminar that we took together during the spring of 2011, my last semester at Yale and her junior spring. The seminar, "Writing About Oneself," was small — there were 12 of us — and the theme of the workshop was first-person personal writing, so my classmates and I quickly became close.

As a writer, Marina continuously amazed me. She had a natural ability to put together just the right words in just the right sequence. Her piece "The Opposite of Loneliness," which the world has come to know in the past week, is an extraordinary example of Marina's gift for articulating complex human emotions — those that many of us feel but can't quite put into words — in the clearest of ways. But understand that this was just one example — Marina did this constantly.

Marina's writing was just so enjoyable to read. Since our class has ended, at three different moments I've thought of distinct essays that Marina had written. All three times, I stopped what I was doing, found the essays in my laptop's archives, and reread her work. Just as I smiled when reading the essays for the first time, I found myself smiling once again, and rereading the best passages over and over. It's impossible not to smile when reading Marina's writing; it is filled with so much personality, excitement, passion, creativity, intellect, and above all, love.

I'm currently living in Peru. While here, I decided to teach an informal writing seminar, based upon the course at Yale we took together, for Peruvian students. Before teaching the seminar, I emailed my classmates from "Writing About Oneself" to ask their permission to share their essays. Marina responded in just 10 minutes: "Yes to everything! This sounds so awesome!" followed by a later email: "Here are some [essays]! Let me know how it goes! You'll be great:)"

I feel like every interaction that had with Marina was marked by a giant exclamation point, as well as a smile, and this is what I liked most about her.

Luke Vargas

I often found it frustrating to walk next to Marina. Instead of charting a straight course down the sidewalk, she would hover beside you, bumping into you as you spoke. As you obsessed with the momentary obstacles ahead – absent-minded high schoolers, the refuse piled on Indian streets, and soon Williamsburg’s hippest hipsters and angriest bikers –Marina's footsteps showed she cared the most about you. That she was drawn to thewarmth of others. Any holding pattern, any pretense or etiquette demanding separation be damned.

A few months ago I wrote Marina to tell her that I had accessed a deep personal happiness for the first time. In a chaotic world that glimpse of true happiness felt frighteningly threatened, so easy to forget amidst prevailing loneliness. So needing to be shared.

She responded:

“I’m honored that you shared your happiness with me. I promise to keep it bottled, sip slightly from your supply, and hand it back if ever you should forget you have it.”

Selfishly I'll hold onto these words forever, but I know I am far from the only one whose happiness Marina was guarding, far from the only one who entrusted Marina with such precious emotions, and whose successes she enjoyed as she found success of her own. Even with a million deadlines her capacity for friendship was without limit, and we knew it.

So each of us leaned on her in our own way, and in her absence there is a fright as we feel ourselves falling without her. In her absence we may feel that bottled happiness is shattered.

If Marina is gone, then maybe we can never have the confirmation we gave it in the first place. Maybe, without her bumping into us there is no chance to recover that love or conversation we offered up, and that she listened to and gravitated toward.

But towards those fears is not where Marina would have walked.

Remarkably, there have been moments this week in which that fear has been nowhere in sight. When we fall onto someone else who had also given their love to Marina. When we smile at that human touch. When we bump into those around us, and we begin to notice. When we are blind to everything else but love.

Marina, thank you for guarding my happiness. And on behalf of the world outside these walls, thank you for showing us how to preserve what it is we have left to feel. For, there is so much left to feel. There is so much work to be done. And as we do it, we will forever guard what it is you gave us, and I promise to welcome your nudges when my path has grown too straight.

Cam Keady

My Marina.

What drew me to Marina and her to me were our shared oddities, quirks, and unconventionalities. At home, away from camp, we were weirdos. We were the dorky theater kids, the Harry Potter aficionados (before that became trendy), and the gangly, awkward pre-pubescents who drifted between social circles and lunch tables, unsure of our proper place in middle school sociability.

What I think we both loved about summer camp was a chance to check these identities at the door, to be stripped of all presumed labels and titles, and to simply be kids, exploring our passions and hobbies in a safe utopian environment that encouraged the basic values of friendship, community, and love.

Of course, as we established ourselves as members of the camp community, we assumed these listed identities as oddballs with pride. Together, we stormed the tiny stage of camp’s outdoor theater with undeveloped musical skills and adolescent tenor voices, forcing cracked and broken melodies through metallic teeth and chapped lips. Actually, that was just me. Marina always sang like an angel. And I don’t think she ever had braces.

Musical theater was what brought us together at camp, but it was our innocent rebellious spirit and curiosity of temptation and defiance that made us friends. Together, hand-in-hand, we made a conscious effort to break every single rule at summer camp. We snuck out of our cabins at night to run along the sandbars of the Cape Cod Bay, skipped our scheduled activities to read and discuss the most recent fantasy novels, and took full advantage of the theater’s costume closet for photo-shoots and perverse dress-up games that involved just the two of us. We were partners in a harmless crime, one that was founded simply in having fun and acting without concern.

One of Marina’s chief qualities was precisely this spirit of action without concern. It inspired and intrigued me, and I followed suit with nearly everything she did during our shared summers on the Cape. She was always focusing on the “am” rather than the “will be,” and it was this revolutionary spirit of remaining present that made me fall in love with her. Marina romanticized the contemporary, as if she was preparing for the nostalgia of the past we’re all experiencing at this very moment. She had this sort of gravitational pull towards people, and it caught me entirely.

The last time I saw Marina was not during one of these childhood summers spent at Cape Cod Sea Camps, but in New York City, the heart of the world, and to Marina, the universe. By some beautiful stroke of fate, we ended up living just four blocks away from each other in the city: a welcomed change from the gendered divide of our home at summer camp. I spent most nights with Marina at her apartment, playing house and reveling in this newfound adult life we were making together after so many summers of living as children. Though during the day we went off to prestigious internships and jobs, we spent our evenings acting as we did during those nights on the Cape—without concern and with love.

One night, I came to the apartment to find Marina seated atop a wooden rocking horse, well, this one was technically a sheep, eating cereal (gluten-free of course) out of an antique porcelain bowl that had adorned the wall of her sublet apartment just hours before. I exclaimed in horror at Marina’s act of disrespect to the owners of the apartment, but she was unaffected by the misdemeanor, insisting she was utilizing the bowl for its intended purpose. I couldn’t argue her on that.

Many moments like this happened throughout the summer, and each time I would just laugh and shake my head, as I often did at camp when Marina would steal cookies out of the dining hall or walk out of her cabin in some bizarre mismatched outfit. Granted, she often wore and did the same in Manhattan. Our summer in New York made for a beautiful full-circle of our friendship, and although we had both changed and matured during time spent apart, what initially drew us to each other is what kept us together for nearly twelve years.

Marina is my childhood, my adolescence, and my early adulthood. And she was, and should have been, my future. Her optimism for the unknown and for the impossible is what comforts me in this unfair and difficult moment, and what will continue to inspire and encourage me for years to come. She made life beautiful, and for that, I’m forever grateful. I love you, Marina. I really do. But you already knew that.

Yael Zinkow

The night that Marina passed away, wanting to feel just a little bit closer to her, I read every piece of her writing that I could find, Yale Daily News articles, poems, plays, late night musings sent via email at 4:30 in the morning. Marina had a particular mastery of the English language; she knew how to manipulate words and phrases, even punctuation. Because of this distinct voice, I did feel a little bit closer to Marina that night and I knew at that moment that I will never stop learning from her, because this small fraction of the writing that she would have accomplished in her life will always be there for me to read in the middle of the night when I yearn for those 3 in the morning conversations that we had from our lofted beds in Saybrook K22.

One interesting pattern I noticed in Marina's writing that night is that she consistently wrote about a crossroads, a difficult choice, a seemingly unfixable paradox. She wrote an article about the choice between the careers we may want and the careers we settle for. She wrote a poem about the choice between making an: and making a perhaps more effective change by sitting at a desk. She wrote a play about the decision one has to make with a five dollar bill...save a child in Africa or put another painting on your wall? Independents is no different, a story about the choice between staying where you're comfortable and moving forward with your life. Marina was obsessed with these choices, with these crossroads in life that are so relatable and yet so difficult to capture in a poem, an article, a play; that is what made her a great writer, the ability to so eloquently portray these decisions we are constantly faced with as we journey through life.

Ironically, Marina has left us at a crossroads. Passing away just days after graduation, she left her friends, the community that, in her now famous words, she pulled around herself, at a fork in the road of life. Where do we go next? What do we do now? 1 know that if Marina were here, she could go around this room, point at each of us, and tell us the path she wanted us to take. Chloe should direct movies. Michael should make music. Tom should keep taking his shirt off on stage until he's doing it on Broadway. And if it turns out that these aren't the things that fulfill us, her voice will still be there, guiding us to find our passions. As David Mogilner recalled in her obituary, "she was our first cheerleader." I think that Marina sat through more a cappella shows, stand-up comedy performances, concerts, and readings than anyone else I knew at Yale, and that was because she believed in us. We all looked at Marina (sometimes, I'll admit, with jealousy) and thought, "She's really gonna make it in this world doing the thing that she loves." But the thing is. She was looking back at us thinking the same thing. She left us at a crossroads. Let's all be inspired by Marina to take the path that inspires us, to not get stuck on the snip, move forward, knowing that Marina would have been right behind us.

Deborah Margolin

Marina's Playwriting Professor

Marina Keegan and Death are two incompatible concepts for me. The parallax between them is vast and unbridgeable. This was a young woman of outrageous intellect, probity, humor, hope. Her brilliance had a restive and relentless quality. She was all legs, all brains. She loved language. Her mindset was richly taut and profoundly casual at once. I never met anyone who combined those two contradictory qualities so completely.

She came to class ready to work in my playwriting seminars. Her scenes were read and everyone sat up straighter. Ideas that seemed parallel became perpendicular. There's no group critique in my classes, only inquiry and reflection; this drove Marina crazy: as if she knew she had little time, she wanted strong criticism; considered it the scaffolding around an edifice under construction.

Marina, a celiac like me, brought gluten-free cake to class, made by her beautiful mother Tracy; Marina never brought a knife, and we all shared this cake, pulling pieces from it with our hands. I knew Marina was Harold Bloom's research assistant, and I asked her to take me to his house so I could argue with him about HAMLET. She brought me over there, got me a cup of tea, and sat across from me while Professor Bloom talked, sending me hysterically funny text messages about my failure to get this man to talk about the play.

When Kaleidoscope, the play designed to welcome incoming freshman to the diverse discourse of the Yale community, was being worked on, Marina's presence was lightening and alembic. She insisted on acknowledging racism, understanding instinctively that we cannot transcend what we will not acknowledge; it was bold and brave, as was everything Marina undertook. This kid was on to something. This child was going to make a difference, and did. This child insisted on herself by way of insisting on hope, on possibility, on beauty, on dirt, on the very nature of personal responsibility. She argued with herself about the value of art in the face of atrocity, and wrote beautiful plays that argued back. She looked at the world we've given her, the humbled, ravishing wreck of it and thought: How can I best help?”

I have a sign-in book that students must fill out whenever I'm teaching a class, and the categories include name, major, year of graduation, phone number, address, and always and finally, some impossible and demented category like Something Everyone Seems to Understand But You Don't, or whatever. In the last entry I have from beautiful Marina, this demented category was:

Everything That Ever Happened To You In Your Whole Life

Marina wrote:

Read a lot and met great people. Was very lucky.

The word LUCKY was underlined.

Kevin Keegan

She could brighten my day, and as you all can now see, she could light up the world with her message of it would never be too late to imagine the possibilities and make a difference. Marina’s death has become a summons to life for the world.

Tracy Shoolman

So what was it like to go school supply shopping with Marina? One of, if not the most sacred ritual of Marina’s childhood was practiced at the start of each September. Although a chore and a harbinger of summer’s end for my other children, for Marina school supply shopping was serious business . There was Marina’s admiration and honoring of the gel pens, the sticky notes .The promise of marbled notebooks and rows of straight backed three ringed binders saluting as she passed . Her exultations and exclamations in sweet sighs over multicolored note cards and fluorescent highlighters . The ritual of selecting and rejecting punctuated with passionate revisions of decisions. A lingering toying and fondling as we approached the checkout line and the closing psalm: “Oh Mom!-This is essential! Seriously!”