LIZA BURKE
Really Saturday’s post, a day early.
I didn’t really know Liza Burke. Her family lived on Melrose Avenue where my son Tom’s family lived and Liza was one of, I believe, six or seven children born within a week of each other on Melrose Avenue, Asheville. My granddaughter Caroline was one of them and these children grew up together as friends on Melrose Avenue. This year most of them were graduating from college, Liza from the University of Georgia.
On spring break Liza went with Georgia classmates for a last spring fling in Mexico where, the exuberant person that she was she swam and danced and leaped into the ocean. Near the end of their time at the beach she suddenly was tired and went back to her room to sleep. She never really woke up to being her vibrant self again. When her friends couldn’t wake her they took her to a clinic which led to a diagnosis of a brain tumor and a flight to Florida to a renowned brain surgeon. But it was too late. The tumor was inoperable. Treatment was tried and failed. Finally her family and friends took her to an ocean cottage where, with Hospice support, she died.
Saturday those who loved her and some of us who barely knew her gathered to celebrate her life. And what a life she had lived, traveling, learning other languages, always curious about other people, empathetic, always vital and vibrant.
For her mother, Laura, who lost another daughter, Edie, at 13 to a debilitating disease, the loss was of course overwhelming, and for all her family and friends Liza’s sudden transition from vibrant fullness of life to death is incomprehensible and painful. She leaves a huge emptiness for so many people.
But as an outsider my immediate pain wasn’t as great, but the mystery of her life and her sudden death, the mystery of all of our lives and our own inexplicable deaths and the deaths around us of those we love was suddenly apparent to me and all of us there.
The stories told by her hockey coach and her best friend and her mother were all beautiful. The hall was full of photographs of her and a collection of videos of her intensely lived life touched everyone.
The hall was full of young women in short skirts and colorful dresses all of them electric with life. If Liza had been there she would have been one more beautiful girl lost in the crowd with the assumption she would live to ninety. Why is it that we have to wait until we are dead to be fully celebrated? She should have been there listening to people celebrate her and tell her how much she meant to them. And she was there, very much alive to everyone there, but she also wasn’t there. Everyone there probably had the feeling of both being there and knowing that any day they could be gone. Emily, in Our Town, laments that people when they are alive don’t recognize how alive they are. The point was made again and again at the celebration that Liza didn’t wait, she took every opportunity she could to live fully, which in her twenty one years she did.
But in the end we were left, or at least I was, with the mystery of my own life and the lives of the people around me and the mystery of our deaths. Life and death both seem incomprehensible. Making me wonder about this again was a gift that Liza gave me without even knowing me and I thank her. And I am glad I got to know her and be touched by her, even in death.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 