Amy cartwheeled through life

The Boston Herald

Another year passes, another begins. Amy died 10 years ago today, in her mother's arms, struggling to stay alive even at the end. Every breath she took meant another few minutes of everything she knew, everyone she loved. “ I want you to come with me,” she whispered to her mother as death approached.

'I wish I could, sweetie,' her mother said holding her. 'But this is something you have to do alone.’

Amy was only 11 when she died. She would have turned 12 a week later but she didn't make it. The cystic fibrosis she had lived with her entire life finally killed her.

Now, a decade later, my friend's daughter, who was also my daughter's best friend, exists in some time-warped limbo. She's still stuck at 11, while all of us have grown older and changed. That's what's so difficult. In the beginning, right after she died, Amy was constantly there beside us, a vibrant, funny, brilliant child who feasted on life, who couldn't get enough of it, who played the recorder so that your heart broke while listening, who wrote short stories full of chatty dialogue, who stood on a stage and acted or read or recited a poem, who so many times and in so many ways took your breath away.

In the beginning, we could close our eyes and see her. Months after her death, she was still so close we could almost hear her.

Most human beings walk through life. Amy cartwheeled through this world. She was pizzazz and panache, a peanut of a person who was always in motion, positive and passionate about everything.

A million things remind me of her: blue hydrangea, black labrador retrievers, recorders, 'Stone Soup,' stained glass, old-fashioned beds high off the floor, snowstorms, 'The Fox and the Hound,' little girls in glasses, little girls who dress up in their mother's clothes, bottles of pills lined up on a kitchen table. Amy used to collect sea glass. Her favorite was red, because it was the rarest and the hardest to find. She kept it at her summer house on Tobey Island.

After she died, someone cleaned the house and threw it away. It was only glass. It was only something she had collected and saved. There were so many other things of hers stories, poems, letters, books, clothing, toys, jewelry. Of what significance were a few pieces of broken glass?

No significance, really. And yet I have been in search of red sea glass since. Every time I'm at a beach I look for it because I think that if I can find a piece of red glass, if I can pick it up and hold it in my hand and take it home and give it to Anne, I will be giving her proof that Amy's spirit still is. We need proof. We need it as the years go by because memory fades, the dead slip away even as we watch, their faces grow distant, their voices faint. Things change, the world changes, people move on, children grow up.

Amy's friends are all adults now, graduating from college this year. The bond that held them together is about to be severed. In a few weeks they won't be part of a group any more, they will no longer be just classmates of Amy's. They'll be part of the world.

And where would Amy be if she were alive? Who would she be? The question invites pain because you look at her friends and you know you could never have imagined them grown up. How can you imagine Amy at 21 when there was no Amy at 13 or 15 or 19? But now it is years later, 10 years after Amy's death, and I have nothing to give her mother, no words that will make things better, no piece of red glass found along a beach, no miraculous proof that Amy still is.

All I can do is remember Amy with her. That's all any of us can do.