![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
eve11Ten years ago, I made a decision. Because so few people have the opportunity to achieve a PhD, I would make sure to do it. I didn't think it would take this much time to complete it. Time passes but always in the back of my mind, I am so, so grateful that I had the luxury of this time.
I made a decision ten years ago to finish and to make it count, and even if I was going into stats instead of pure math, and wasn't heading for academia or teaching, that I would always keep on being a math chick. And because one person would never ever get the chance to finish her dissertation, I would finish mine and I would make it be for both of us.
Memories of a person turn into a little set of discrete moments that stick in your head. Even of people you see every day, even of your closest friends; as time goes on the details are these few crisp scenes, strung together by your impressions and thoughts. It's distressing; did the friendship still "count" if the distinct memories have faded? I find this even happens with family too, and things that happened last week. But it is frustrating to think of it this way when memories are all you have. So much time has passed; ten years, and suddenly it's no time at all.
So, my memories of Colleen:
- Meeting her for the first time at the dining hall in 1995, wondering what was up with her; long straight red hair in a plain ponytail, freckles all over the place, sharp features and thick glasses, dressed in a dark green turtleneck. I was a bit confused because she seemed to be trembling all over. (I never asked her about it, though I did do a little bit of research out of curiosity and discovered that it was most likely some form of cerebral palsy, and I left it at that.) I was more confused because she was eating plain wheat toast with nothing on it, not even butter. And in the midst of about day five of a freshman year at college--where so many people waffled around on why they were there, and even the people who had a major tied down said it like they were poking swampy ground ahead with a long pointy stick--when we asked her what her major was she said "Math" and we all knew she meant it.
- Me and Colleen and Pat in Physics 2, doing the "drop the meter stick" measurement of reaction time and having to adapt it for Colleen's inevitable outlier. Even when we put the meter stick at the very bottom and dropped it all the way through its height she couldn't catch it before it slipped past. These days I would just mark her reaction time as a censored data point and use a CDF measurement there in the likelihood for her. Maybe that's what we ended up doing; just writing "1m" down for her, and moving on. Or maybe she concentrated a bit harder for one more try, and Pat held on just a fraction longer, steadying the meter stick until she grasped it.
- Dressing as the Endless for Halloween. Colleen as Delirium with her string of gummy Swedish fish behind her.
- Her quiet assurance in all things mathematical. The precision with which she took notes, wrote out homework problems, explained details. She loved math and she was not afraid to show it, not at all. But where I fell in love with big concepts, metaphors and an almost visual perception of beauty in the subject, I think she loved all of that but that she equally loved all of the minute details. The certainty of tying down a particular proof or integral in her determined and shaky handwriting. Limits, logic, repeated fractions, continuity. There was something underlying all of it for her, and I wanted to know what it was. I wanted to know how she thought.
- Walking back to our shared apartment (number 617) in the summer of 1999, trying to do the Sieve of Eratosthenes in our heads up to the square root of 617 so we could determine whether or not 617 was prime.
- Her face lighting up when Randy gave her headphones in the Atherton lobby, that were apparently playing Dar Williams ("Christians and the Pagans"). I'd never heard of Dar Williams until then. She knew exactly who it was and started singing along.
- Sitting in Number Theory class together, a tiny room in the McAllister math building; literally a closet with 12 desks and a blackboard shoved in.
- Making cookies without a mixer. Me stirring fridge-hard butter with a wooden spoon until it softened because I am very impatient. Her spooning the batter onto the sheet.
- Playing pool in the basement rec room. She was terrible at it but she played anyway.
- Her perfect pitch, how she would correct Graydon when he said he was singing in tune. Her complaining that the shower had driven her crazy that morning because it was whistling a dissonance right between two notes.
- Learning "ithiga" speech from her for the first time.
- Writing notes backward to be read in mirrors.
- Looking at a few pages of an early honors thesis draft of hers while sitting in the closet classroom. It was something to do with missile trajectories, I think; she was working with the Applied Research Lab at PSU. I was unfamiliar with TeX, so I must not yet have started writing mine. She had a compile error somewhere and was frustrated she couldn't track it down. I had no idea how someone could have a compile error while writing a document.
- Randy teasing her. "Colleen....!" for some reason I think he was threatening to say "Linoleum!" afterward? Was there possibly also something with Mr. Mistoffilees? No, it was one of the other cats. Help me college folks, which one? But anyway she would try to be angry but she couldn't stop smiling. Then she would yell at him, sometimes literal wordless yells.
[And later, friends bolstering my memory; yes, Linoleum was one of the words she couldn't stand, along with "insert", "kumquat", and making elephant noises. One year some folks gave her an actual tile of linoleum that could be worn as a placard, and an INSERT key off of a keyboard. The Cat was Rum Tum Tugger. And I think Randy (and possibly Evil Mike?) would just test random words out on her. I think I remember "Colleen!....bassoon," but I don't remember whether she shrugged it off or ran from the room.]
- Walking down the block on the street by Old Main, Colleen having to head back up to one of the administrative buildings. I asked why and she said she had to fill out some kind of form for her disability. And I had to stop and think about it before I realized that oh yeah, I suppose she did have a disability. I hardly noticed it anymore, and when I did I didn't think of it that way; it was just part of who she was.
- Talking on ICQ after she moved on to UIUC in 1999. Just silly things. What classes she was taking. She liked a boy. She graduated the year before me and moved on, but we talked a bit over that chat client when I was at PSU. Chat was still a very early technology and not so integrated with everything as it is now. No Facebook. No Gmail. No smart phones. We'd lost touch by the time I was at the CMU statistics department in 2000.
The next I heard was when Christine called me (trying to get in touch with me all day because I'd been on the computer, dial-up, likely surfing X-files stories), to tell me Colleen had been hit by a car and killed while walking along the side of the road at UIUC. She died on July 23, 2002. She was 25 years old.
I remember hanging up the phone, sitting at the top of the stairs in my apartment on 5th avenue, gathering laundry and feeling numb. I went to my old giant desktop and drew up all of the history of our few chats, the last of which must have occurred two years prior. I saved them on a 3.5 floppy disk and thought I should send them to her family, but for some reason I decided against it; thought it might be stupid or somehow self-serving. I think I might still have the disk somewhere. I don't think I have a computer left that can read it.
I met with my then-advisor that day or the next. I was wearing a long green skirt. I never wear skirts. It may have been that it was the only clean outfit I had (see above, re: laundry). I was trying to be okay with things. I just told my advisor that yes, I could work on things for X or Y but I had to go out of town that weekend. And when he asked why I just blurted out "for a funeral" and burst into tears.
Snippets of things that I synthesize into a story:
She was very studious and serious when she was in math mode. She was down to earth, a purist and extremely passionate about her subject. But she also had a fun and self-assured streak to her. She was a cool person to hang out with. She had a bit of a wicked smile and liked to relax and have fun, and she could be very silly. I almost never saw her sad or down, but maybe I mistook sad and down for thinking deep thoughts.
She was a little older than I was and in some ways more mature. I think she was more used to having to work at things. I skipped classes; she didn't. I left assignments to the last minute; she gave herself enough time to meticulously re-copy her hand-worked problems before turning them in. I took to discrete math like a fish to water but struggled with higher calc and the less "fun" stuff; she soaked up number theory and differential equations equally, and she loved all of it. I remember helping her with an English essay where she wrote about the fact that she didn't learn to walk until she was four years old. But that meant that she noticed a lot, and had time to think.
And I think I learned from her how to revel in being different, being surprising. How to be true to myself. Math and I were late-coming friends; I didn't really start liking it until 11th grade. Colleen was the first real "math chick" I ever met. By my second semester I was taking esoteric math electives; by my second year I was already an unofficial math major before I added it as a second degree. I had female calculus teachers in high school, but it's different to look up to a teacher when you are a teen-ager, as opposed to looking up to a friend. And being a math teacher is different than being a mathematician. Even at 19, Colleen was a mathematician.
She was, in all respects, an amazing person. And what I think is that the world, the whole wide world, is diminished because she left it so early.
I still have dreams sometimes where the accident was a mistake, some kind of misinterpretation of information on my part. She hadn't died; she was recovering in an old country house, surrounded by fields of corn and sunflowers, isolated in a vale where far-away cliffs rose up to touch the sky. I would visit her in these dreams and she was mercurial and distant, struggling to come back to the world. She was the dimmest thing in the room, like a ghola who had forgotten who they were truly meant to be. But even then, even despite all of these strange inconsistencies that made perfect sense in dreams, there was still that hope when I was asleep, that she was continuing somehow. That she hadn't died in such a blameless, senseless way. That even if I forgot her, she would still be out there, making her way. Experiencing the world and letting it experience her.
I'd wake up from these dreams, so far removed from the event, and I'd think how terrible it is for her family: for her beautiful younger sisters and brother, who miss her more than I, as a fading college friend, have any right to do. For her mom and dad, who nurtured her and gave her so much (everything except a middle name, her user ID was cxk because it had to be), and who I could tell immediately when I met them--her mom when we shared that summer apartment, her dad, not until her funeral--how they had helped to shape her into this utterly remarkable, unique and wonderful person. This is the worst family ever to lose someone like this, I think. This is the family that can handle it the most and that deserves it the least.
Her parents who you could tell even at Colleen's funeral were still best friends and would not let tragedy take that away. Her mom who said that she'd been sitting with Colleen's sister, just missing her, all the way in Illinois, and wanting to talk to her before the call came on the day she died. Her dad who was so composed and genuine talking at her wake, who explained that anyone who knew Colleen, the first thing they would notice was that she was "wiggly". He explained to us that the trembling was athetoid cerebral palsy, but that she had also had a cocktail of some others: ataxic that affected her balance, spastic that gave her some jerky movements and facial tics. It was the first time I heard a specific name given to her disability. Right now, it's all I remember specifically except afterward, her dad wanting to know from the group of us, reunited, sitting in the circle of chairs in the bright green grass, that his little girl was accepted and "normal" at college.
She was, of course she was. She was brilliant.
She never got to write a dissertation, to be a post-doc or a faculty member. She never got to fight for tenure or put "Doctor" in front of her name. She never got to be a PhD math chick.
So ten years ago I decided that I would be a PhD math chick for both of us. I would write a dissertation in the discipline of statistics--not her discipline, but the weird red-headed stepchild of math, that has to work a little bit harder, be a little bit different, to deal with the real world--and I would dedicate it to her. I didn't tell very many people about it because I've been so scared that I wouldn't finish. I envision the big picture and the end result, but a dissertation is all about the details, which has never been my strength. Still, I learn. I continue. And her memory is always in the back of my mind, more than an inspiration or an obligation or a lesson learned. She deserved so much more. She was my friend, and I miss her.
These are my memories. Others have other pieces of the puzzle and it's worthwhile to take them out and polish them. We lose people, and we have these discrete, pristine moments that our minds have decided for one reason or another are easy electrochemical formations to relax into; the passing years seem to solidify only these. But underlying that is this strange intangible fabric; the insight of a symmetry that completes these discrete recreations of our senses. Because underneath that is the continuity--the parts of you that those people have shaped. This fact exists orthogonal to any further passage of time: I wouldn't be where I am today without her.
I made a decision ten years ago to finish and to make it count, and even if I was going into stats instead of pure math, and wasn't heading for academia or teaching, that I would always keep on being a math chick. And because one person would never ever get the chance to finish her dissertation, I would finish mine and I would make it be for both of us.
Memories of a person turn into a little set of discrete moments that stick in your head. Even of people you see every day, even of your closest friends; as time goes on the details are these few crisp scenes, strung together by your impressions and thoughts. It's distressing; did the friendship still "count" if the distinct memories have faded? I find this even happens with family too, and things that happened last week. But it is frustrating to think of it this way when memories are all you have. So much time has passed; ten years, and suddenly it's no time at all.
So, my memories of Colleen:
- Meeting her for the first time at the dining hall in 1995, wondering what was up with her; long straight red hair in a plain ponytail, freckles all over the place, sharp features and thick glasses, dressed in a dark green turtleneck. I was a bit confused because she seemed to be trembling all over. (I never asked her about it, though I did do a little bit of research out of curiosity and discovered that it was most likely some form of cerebral palsy, and I left it at that.) I was more confused because she was eating plain wheat toast with nothing on it, not even butter. And in the midst of about day five of a freshman year at college--where so many people waffled around on why they were there, and even the people who had a major tied down said it like they were poking swampy ground ahead with a long pointy stick--when we asked her what her major was she said "Math" and we all knew she meant it.
- Me and Colleen and Pat in Physics 2, doing the "drop the meter stick" measurement of reaction time and having to adapt it for Colleen's inevitable outlier. Even when we put the meter stick at the very bottom and dropped it all the way through its height she couldn't catch it before it slipped past. These days I would just mark her reaction time as a censored data point and use a CDF measurement there in the likelihood for her. Maybe that's what we ended up doing; just writing "1m" down for her, and moving on. Or maybe she concentrated a bit harder for one more try, and Pat held on just a fraction longer, steadying the meter stick until she grasped it.
- Dressing as the Endless for Halloween. Colleen as Delirium with her string of gummy Swedish fish behind her.
- Her quiet assurance in all things mathematical. The precision with which she took notes, wrote out homework problems, explained details. She loved math and she was not afraid to show it, not at all. But where I fell in love with big concepts, metaphors and an almost visual perception of beauty in the subject, I think she loved all of that but that she equally loved all of the minute details. The certainty of tying down a particular proof or integral in her determined and shaky handwriting. Limits, logic, repeated fractions, continuity. There was something underlying all of it for her, and I wanted to know what it was. I wanted to know how she thought.
- Walking back to our shared apartment (number 617) in the summer of 1999, trying to do the Sieve of Eratosthenes in our heads up to the square root of 617 so we could determine whether or not 617 was prime.
- Her face lighting up when Randy gave her headphones in the Atherton lobby, that were apparently playing Dar Williams ("Christians and the Pagans"). I'd never heard of Dar Williams until then. She knew exactly who it was and started singing along.
- Sitting in Number Theory class together, a tiny room in the McAllister math building; literally a closet with 12 desks and a blackboard shoved in.
- Making cookies without a mixer. Me stirring fridge-hard butter with a wooden spoon until it softened because I am very impatient. Her spooning the batter onto the sheet.
- Playing pool in the basement rec room. She was terrible at it but she played anyway.
- Her perfect pitch, how she would correct Graydon when he said he was singing in tune. Her complaining that the shower had driven her crazy that morning because it was whistling a dissonance right between two notes.
- Learning "ithiga" speech from her for the first time.
- Writing notes backward to be read in mirrors.
- Looking at a few pages of an early honors thesis draft of hers while sitting in the closet classroom. It was something to do with missile trajectories, I think; she was working with the Applied Research Lab at PSU. I was unfamiliar with TeX, so I must not yet have started writing mine. She had a compile error somewhere and was frustrated she couldn't track it down. I had no idea how someone could have a compile error while writing a document.
- Randy teasing her. "Colleen....!" for some reason I think he was threatening to say "Linoleum!" afterward? Was there possibly also something with Mr. Mistoffilees? No, it was one of the other cats. Help me college folks, which one? But anyway she would try to be angry but she couldn't stop smiling. Then she would yell at him, sometimes literal wordless yells.
[And later, friends bolstering my memory; yes, Linoleum was one of the words she couldn't stand, along with "insert", "kumquat", and making elephant noises. One year some folks gave her an actual tile of linoleum that could be worn as a placard, and an INSERT key off of a keyboard. The Cat was Rum Tum Tugger. And I think Randy (and possibly Evil Mike?) would just test random words out on her. I think I remember "Colleen!....bassoon," but I don't remember whether she shrugged it off or ran from the room.]
- Walking down the block on the street by Old Main, Colleen having to head back up to one of the administrative buildings. I asked why and she said she had to fill out some kind of form for her disability. And I had to stop and think about it before I realized that oh yeah, I suppose she did have a disability. I hardly noticed it anymore, and when I did I didn't think of it that way; it was just part of who she was.
- Talking on ICQ after she moved on to UIUC in 1999. Just silly things. What classes she was taking. She liked a boy. She graduated the year before me and moved on, but we talked a bit over that chat client when I was at PSU. Chat was still a very early technology and not so integrated with everything as it is now. No Facebook. No Gmail. No smart phones. We'd lost touch by the time I was at the CMU statistics department in 2000.
The next I heard was when Christine called me (trying to get in touch with me all day because I'd been on the computer, dial-up, likely surfing X-files stories), to tell me Colleen had been hit by a car and killed while walking along the side of the road at UIUC. She died on July 23, 2002. She was 25 years old.
I remember hanging up the phone, sitting at the top of the stairs in my apartment on 5th avenue, gathering laundry and feeling numb. I went to my old giant desktop and drew up all of the history of our few chats, the last of which must have occurred two years prior. I saved them on a 3.5 floppy disk and thought I should send them to her family, but for some reason I decided against it; thought it might be stupid or somehow self-serving. I think I might still have the disk somewhere. I don't think I have a computer left that can read it.
I met with my then-advisor that day or the next. I was wearing a long green skirt. I never wear skirts. It may have been that it was the only clean outfit I had (see above, re: laundry). I was trying to be okay with things. I just told my advisor that yes, I could work on things for X or Y but I had to go out of town that weekend. And when he asked why I just blurted out "for a funeral" and burst into tears.
Snippets of things that I synthesize into a story:
She was very studious and serious when she was in math mode. She was down to earth, a purist and extremely passionate about her subject. But she also had a fun and self-assured streak to her. She was a cool person to hang out with. She had a bit of a wicked smile and liked to relax and have fun, and she could be very silly. I almost never saw her sad or down, but maybe I mistook sad and down for thinking deep thoughts.
She was a little older than I was and in some ways more mature. I think she was more used to having to work at things. I skipped classes; she didn't. I left assignments to the last minute; she gave herself enough time to meticulously re-copy her hand-worked problems before turning them in. I took to discrete math like a fish to water but struggled with higher calc and the less "fun" stuff; she soaked up number theory and differential equations equally, and she loved all of it. I remember helping her with an English essay where she wrote about the fact that she didn't learn to walk until she was four years old. But that meant that she noticed a lot, and had time to think.
And I think I learned from her how to revel in being different, being surprising. How to be true to myself. Math and I were late-coming friends; I didn't really start liking it until 11th grade. Colleen was the first real "math chick" I ever met. By my second semester I was taking esoteric math electives; by my second year I was already an unofficial math major before I added it as a second degree. I had female calculus teachers in high school, but it's different to look up to a teacher when you are a teen-ager, as opposed to looking up to a friend. And being a math teacher is different than being a mathematician. Even at 19, Colleen was a mathematician.
She was, in all respects, an amazing person. And what I think is that the world, the whole wide world, is diminished because she left it so early.
I still have dreams sometimes where the accident was a mistake, some kind of misinterpretation of information on my part. She hadn't died; she was recovering in an old country house, surrounded by fields of corn and sunflowers, isolated in a vale where far-away cliffs rose up to touch the sky. I would visit her in these dreams and she was mercurial and distant, struggling to come back to the world. She was the dimmest thing in the room, like a ghola who had forgotten who they were truly meant to be. But even then, even despite all of these strange inconsistencies that made perfect sense in dreams, there was still that hope when I was asleep, that she was continuing somehow. That she hadn't died in such a blameless, senseless way. That even if I forgot her, she would still be out there, making her way. Experiencing the world and letting it experience her.
I'd wake up from these dreams, so far removed from the event, and I'd think how terrible it is for her family: for her beautiful younger sisters and brother, who miss her more than I, as a fading college friend, have any right to do. For her mom and dad, who nurtured her and gave her so much (everything except a middle name, her user ID was cxk because it had to be), and who I could tell immediately when I met them--her mom when we shared that summer apartment, her dad, not until her funeral--how they had helped to shape her into this utterly remarkable, unique and wonderful person. This is the worst family ever to lose someone like this, I think. This is the family that can handle it the most and that deserves it the least.
Her parents who you could tell even at Colleen's funeral were still best friends and would not let tragedy take that away. Her mom who said that she'd been sitting with Colleen's sister, just missing her, all the way in Illinois, and wanting to talk to her before the call came on the day she died. Her dad who was so composed and genuine talking at her wake, who explained that anyone who knew Colleen, the first thing they would notice was that she was "wiggly". He explained to us that the trembling was athetoid cerebral palsy, but that she had also had a cocktail of some others: ataxic that affected her balance, spastic that gave her some jerky movements and facial tics. It was the first time I heard a specific name given to her disability. Right now, it's all I remember specifically except afterward, her dad wanting to know from the group of us, reunited, sitting in the circle of chairs in the bright green grass, that his little girl was accepted and "normal" at college.
She was, of course she was. She was brilliant.
She never got to write a dissertation, to be a post-doc or a faculty member. She never got to fight for tenure or put "Doctor" in front of her name. She never got to be a PhD math chick.
So ten years ago I decided that I would be a PhD math chick for both of us. I would write a dissertation in the discipline of statistics--not her discipline, but the weird red-headed stepchild of math, that has to work a little bit harder, be a little bit different, to deal with the real world--and I would dedicate it to her. I didn't tell very many people about it because I've been so scared that I wouldn't finish. I envision the big picture and the end result, but a dissertation is all about the details, which has never been my strength. Still, I learn. I continue. And her memory is always in the back of my mind, more than an inspiration or an obligation or a lesson learned. She deserved so much more. She was my friend, and I miss her.
These are my memories. Others have other pieces of the puzzle and it's worthwhile to take them out and polish them. We lose people, and we have these discrete, pristine moments that our minds have decided for one reason or another are easy electrochemical formations to relax into; the passing years seem to solidify only these. But underlying that is this strange intangible fabric; the insight of a symmetry that completes these discrete recreations of our senses. Because underneath that is the continuity--the parts of you that those people have shaped. This fact exists orthogonal to any further passage of time: I wouldn't be where I am today without her.
