Today is Sarah Browder's death day. In commemorating her existence and her untimely passage,
I have some thoughts that I 'd like to peck out.
People who knew her will say Sarah was a free spirit. She was loving and generous. She was creative and funny. I saw Sarah's fragility. She tried so hard to cover it up with her raucous laughter, her flirtatiousness, her drinking. I worried about her. Rather than embrace her tender heart and guard it carefully, she held her heart wide open, embracing everyone equally. And when you do this, your heart inevitably gets trampled on the ground. Like a tiny bug under a bully's foot. Like a flower in a cow pasture. Sarah got stomped on.
She was resilient, though. It broke my heart to watch her weep in a pile of despondency at night and get up the next morning, laughing, getting ready to do it all over again: to set herself up for more heart stomp by loving fully and passionately regardless of the way others treated her.
I did not like being surprised by the news that she had married. It seemed to have happened in secrecy and this put me on alert. This was trouble, I felt. It was nearly impossible to talk Sarah into doing anything she didn't want to do or out of doing something she wanted to do. Any way, it was too late. I hoped that she would realize soon enough that she'd made a mistake and dissolve this marriage. I didn't even know the guy. I just had a feeling.
I never told Sarah that.
I rarely saw Sarah after she married. And I never met her husband. Kirk. Kirk Harris. A marine. Son of a doctor in Winston-Salem.
The night that Kirk shot her, she had been at the Silver Moon Saloon where a mutual friend worked. He had seen Sarah and Kirk that night. He said Sarah seemed the same as always. And Kirk seemed the same as always: a dick. My friend the bartender had met Kirk, so he could say that.
There are things I wonder about. I can't help it. Kirk shot Sarah in the throat and the shoulder as she was running away from him. His bullets severed Sarah's spinal chord. Had she lived, she would have been paralyzed from the neck down. Her larynx was damaged. She could not speak. She laid in the cool damp grass of predawn before anyone noticed her. Alone and wounded in the grass for what must have seemed like eternity to her. Where was her mind? What was she thinking after this traumatic event? After the man who swore to love and protect her shot her? And after he shot himself and died in the driveway across the street? Did she realize he had shot himself?
How did she look in the hospital, without her usual purple eye shadow and eyeliner? Was her face injured from the bullets? How much did her body hurt? How was her emotional state when the marines came in to tell her that her husband had died of a self inflicted gunshot wound? Was she comforted by her parents, by her sister and brother?
Kirk got off easy. Sarah lingered in the ICU for four days before she died. It was all so unfair. So wrong.
I wish I could have seen her one last time to tell her I loved her. I wish I could say that I'm sorry I never came to get that haircut from her when she was in cosmetology school. I wish she hadn't died at all. I wish she hadn't married. I wish I'd kept her under my wing and protected her.
Wishing is a form of magical thinking that we believe does some good. It really doesn't. All wishing does is torment the wisher.
I write these words with fondness, sorrow, love and gratitude. Women everywhere: you are smart. You are beautiful. You are well loved. You have a unique reason for being here. Treasure your heart. Do not allow any mistreatment of your body or emotions to transpire. Stand up for your beauty, for your wisdom, for your strength. Be everything all at once. Be free. Be happy.
I love you.
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