The Loss of Innocence

My heart is breaking for the Kirven family who lost their son this weekend. Helping Carter understand and get through this sudden and sad ending to her classmates life is not easy. It takes a long time to process and you never really get over it. The ending of an old person’s life is the expected order of things, but someone young is unsettling.

When I was a college sophomore I made wonderful friend with a freshman named Suzanne Farrell. She was bubbly and beautiful and always fun. Suzanne was from the town next to mine at home so I gave her rides home for vacations. At Christmas break after I left her at her house in New Canaan I found a notebook in the backseat of my yellow VW. Flipping the book open to the middle I found the lord’s prayer written out in Suzanne’s neat printing. I realized it was her journal and closed it, not wanting to intrude on her privacy. I called her and told her I had it.

We had sorority rush second semester at my school and Suzanne desperately wanted to be a Pi Phi like me. She and her friends would come to rush parties and meet all the sisters and after ask me if I thought she had a chance to get in. I was membership chairman and so I could not really answer her, but as her friend I would reassure her. Of course she got in and then she became my little sister.   I still can picture her with her long brown side ponytail tied with a big grosgrain ribbon bow in her wine and silver blue shirt at the ceremony where you got your big sister. It was a happy day for both of us.

That summer while I was living in Carlisle and Suzanne was back at home she was killed in a terrible accident with two other friends. I found out when one of my sorority sisters called me because she had heard about it on the radio. Then life became very blurry. I don’t remember driving myself home to Connecticut, but I do remember her mother giving all of Suzanne’s friends one of her hair ribbons to wear at the funeral.

While I sat in her church listening to the congregation recite the Lord’s Prayer I had a feeling of peace pass over me. I knew that Suzanne had a strong faith in God. I knew that my finding her journal and just by chance opening it to the page where she had written the Lord’s Prayer was no coincidence. Call it faith, karma or kismet, some higher power was looking out for me, letting me know things were going to be all right.

I was still sad that her life was too short and unfinished, but she brought great joy into the lives of the people who knew her. I chose to celebrate that joy and that I was lucky enough to know her. As time goes on I forget the names and the faces of more and more people I knew longer, but Suzanne Farrell and her positive outlook on the world still stays with me. Perhaps that was what she was here to do.