Remembering Amy, ever 11

The Boston Herald

May 11, 1995

I don't know why it felt so important to find the exact spot. She isn't there. I recognize this. And yet it didn't seem enough just to ride around and lump her together with DICKSON and HARRISON and WHITTENBERGER and all the other people I never met. I knew Amy - knew her for too short a time, too long ago. But I knew her well. She was my daughter's best friend; because of her, her mother and I became friends.

And so I drove to Linwood Cemetery in Weston last week to visit Amy's grave. I told her mother I would. It was the 11th anniversary of Amy's death at age 11. Anne has never missed an anniversary, but this year she is away. I promised I'd go to the grave for her. And though she said, no, I didn't have to, I wanted to go. Anne gave me directions, which I wrote down. But I started from the entrance three times and still couldn't find the spot. I didn't mind driving around. It was a beautiful day, warm, almost balmy; I had my sun roof open. The cemetery felt like a church without a roof, peaceful and quiet and serene.

I suppose I would have continued driving up and down the hilly, narrow roads, inspecting every stone until I stumbled on hers, if a young man who was mowing the grass hadn't stopped what he was doing to lead me there. I had never been to Amy's grave, not even after her funeral. She was cremated so the burial was later. I never went after this because the grave isn't where she lives. Anne and I talk about Amy all the time, but the cemetery isn't part of our conversation. We talk about her life, not her death. And so I didn't know about the bronze plaque in the ground with her name and the years she lived and the three words that someone chose to forever describe her: Brave, Sprightly, Loving.

The words made my heart ache the way it did that morning the phone rang and Anne in her brave voice said Amy had died. Amy's life and death felt new again. Brave. Amy was certainly brave. "I remember when I found out C.F. [cystic fibrosis] was a serious, even fatal disease," she wrote for a school essay. "I found a newspaper clipping of an article that had been done on my family many years back. The headline read something like, 'Knowledge Helps Family Cope With Fatal Illness.' I can still feel how awful it was to associate the word fatal, meaning deadly or death, with me. I was so terrified . . . But now that I'm older, I've learned to accept that fact." Older. She was 10 when she wrote this.

Sprightly. Amy was this. She was Tinkerbell and Peter Pan, a minx, an elf, a jumping bean. Everything interested her. She was an actress, a ballerina, a singer, a musician, an artist, a poet.

Loving. This is the word that hurt most of all. Amy was loving. Amy was Anne in a younger form. She loved everything, every one, every moment of her short life. She never got to grow up. She never got to drive a car or dress up for a prom or go to Radcliffe or write a book. She had such dreams and potential. She took them all with her when she died.

I see her doing cartwheels in my garage; I see her parading down the long staircase in her front hall pretending to be Queen Guinevere; I see her sitting at my kitchen table eating pancakes; I see her with her mother walking along a beach. I think about her, remember her. But I seldom see her in action any more. She has turned into a photograph in my mind. "Brave," "sprightly," "loving" brought the photograph to life. These words made me see Amy as she was and they made me cry once again for all that she could have been.