Dying young has been overly romanticized, and I never understand why. Yes, it happens and it’s sad, but I always followed a sort of existentialist view, concerning myself with the fact that I would never be touched by such an event, and the lack of association made that O.K.
In novels, the death of someone young usually represents a concern for the future. When someone young dies, an endless assortment of possibilities goes with them, and a potential for greatness is gone. As greats die, we recognize the impact they’ve had on our lives and mourn for whatever projects they were working on that will never be realized. The death of someone young, who had not yet had the chance to affect the world on a global scale, but only locally amongst family, friends, and fans who lucked into finding their work, is somehow worse. When Steve Jobs died, for example, everyone knew who he was and had a piece of his work in our pockets. It wasn’t until my writing inspiration, Marina Keegan, died that I felt the romanticism of the situation touch me as I turned the pages in her first and last novel.
Marina Keegan was 22 when she died — five days after graduating Magna Cum Laude from Yale University and before she was going to start her job at The New Yorker. I read her short story “Cold Pastoral” in a creative writing class during my junior year of high school. It’s about a girl dating a boy, but doesn’t know if she’s dating him because she genuinely likes him or because teenagers should date and he makes her feel good. She’s overconfident in the fact that he needs her more than she needs him, but her perspective tilts when her boyfriend dies and his ex-girlfriend asks her to retrieve and hide his journal. The main character cannot help herself and opens the pages to the story of her boyfriend’s love story with his ex-girlfriend, and his true feelings about her — which matched her own seeming indifference. The plot is simple, and yet so much is packed into it. There is substance, quality, and I had never read something so honest in my life. It felt like when your best friend gives you updates on something in her life, months at a time, and by the end you’ve followed along with every detail until the climactic present. Keegan ended her story with the greatest understanding of the present — her main character knowing and not knowing, and coming to the greater human understanding that sometimes not knowing is the first step in comprehension.
Soon after, I found out that one of Keegan’s teacher’s and her parents joined together to make a compilation of the best short stories and essays she had written for class and pleasure, and they had them published in her posthumous book “The Opposite of Loneliness: Essays and Stories.” I struggled reading the book, oscillating between wanting to continue reading and knowing that the end — the only end there would ever be — was coming.
My heart broke when I finished.
In the beginning of the novel, one of her teachers included a list Keegan made on the things she wanted to do better with regards to her writing. Most of the things were what I loved about her writing — they were different and caught your attention in a way other writers can’t. I had started adopting what she considered as faults into my own writing, admiring how simple sentences gave the most lively compound meanings and compound sentences added a tone to the pages that I had never been able to develop.
Her writing is everything I hope mine can ever be.
While I work on developing my own voice, I think of how hers was silenced before she had the opportunity to go from awe-inspiring to beyond. And that’s where the romance is. A pedestal from which she can never fall holds her brilliantly in my mind. Her entire life was set up for her, and all she wanted out of it was to be an author. Now she’s on the New York Time’s Bestseller’s List.
Romantic.
