Eulogy

Back when I was only 10 and Carrie was 8 years old, we worked on a newspaper called The Grant Gazette. It was “published” to every neighbor on the 1800-1900 block of Grant Street. Carrie helped me deliver it for a few months, and then she began writing her own column. Here is how she began her first column:

“Carrie’s Corner, by Carrie Shepard. Hi. I’m Carrie, and this is my corner. It’s called Carrie’s Corner. I’m going to be writing about this every month. The main thing I’m going to talk about is the different kinds of animals and bugs and what they do.” And then, well, she talked about the animals and bugs, and she told people, “if you have a question, send to Carrie’s Corner, and I will do my best to answer it.”

And answer questions she did. People came to Carrie with questions from all over. From her brothers and her sister to cousins and even uncles, parents, and especially her friends, people found a trust in Carrie. She was everybody’s secret-keeper. You could count on her to be genuine and just tell you what was on her mind, and a lot of times that meant that she may say something unexpected. But whatever she said was what she wanted to say – she was not a faker.

Carrie learned to paint, she dabbled in poetry, and she loved to act. Whatever she tried, she was successful at. She used her art as a way to express the world around her. Shortly after her friend Ryan died while recovering from a bone marrow transplant last June, Carrie wrote a poem called The Candle. You can read it on the back of your mass book later. Ryan meant a lot to her, and it helped her during her own experiences with death.

Here is a poem Carrie wrote in another issue of the Grant Gazette:

Poem for Maureen Magee’s Cats
by Carrie Shepard

Kate is curious
Shamas is shy
They sit at the window
and watch people go by.

One’s a boy and
One’s a girl;
Brother and sister and
They get along well.

OK, another memory. This time when she was in the hospital in April. When I came in she greeted me with her bright smile. “Hey Luke!” Even though the hospital bed is not big enough for two teenagers, she invited me to crawl in with her. And even though she was the sick one in the hospital, she kept moving over to make sure I was comfortable. “Are you sure you have enough space? Here, let me move over a bit…” SHE, with an arm that looked like a volcano, was asking ME, a healthy 20-year old, if I was comfortable. Well, I guess that’s how it went with her. She made the people closest to her feel like kings and queens. Scott and Nora were always welcome in her bed, and Shira, Kieran, and Molly, too. Climbing into bed with Carrie – or just being with her, period – made me feel loved.

Carrie never stopped fighting for her survival, strangely even after she had accepted her fate. She somehow managed to both acknowledge her death and believe in her life at the same time. Like many of us here, myself included, it was very difficult for my father to accept her death as something inevitable. After her doctor declared her terminal, my dad searched for alternative medicines that might pull off the miracle we all hoped for. And Carrie wasn’t willing to submit entirely to what her doctor had to say. She compromised with my dad – she said she would take one pill of his choosing every day. Of course, he had a whole bunch of pills to choose from. So Peter told my dad, “Hey Jeff, you should wad them all up into a ball and have her take that.” My dad toyed with that idea. He asked her, “Hey Carrie, what if I gave you a pill the size of a fist?” That was too much. Her immediate response was “Then you would get punched with it.”

Carrie was a good person to stay up late with.

Last summer I went to Washington, DC. I was nervous about leaving for the whole summer. The night before I left, I was not tired and I was up the whole night getting ready to leave. Carrie stayed up with me. After many hours of talking and packing, we noticed that the sun was going to come up soon. She suggested we go to the beach and watch the sunrise. We felt so sneaky, getting in the car in the early morning and driving to Lighthouse beach. We set up a blanket on the beach and sat there even though it was really cold and the bugs were biting and the sun was hidden behind the clouds. But we sat there anyway, and we loved it.

Carrie was a friend to many. Her close friend Shira shared the following story with me, which took place less than two weeks after her relapse. Michael Monahan had just passed away, her world was being turned upside down, and Carrie was dealing with more in a matter of days than many people do in their entire lives. On the phone with Shira, Carrie told her about the evening she had spent with some friends from the One Step at a Time camp. She described how comforting it had been. She said she felt full, the way you do after a meal, not meaning that there wasn’t room left for more, but that there was so much rich stuff to digest.

There are so many other stories I could talk about, like the time when she stole the car on a drivers permit and then lied point-blank to my parents’ face. Or the time when she and her friend Amy skipped her second period class to find a pair of lost shoes at the bus stop. Or the time she spent counseling her camp friend Tiara as Tiara faced terminal cancer. Or when she tried to go to Great America but instead ended up at an office building in the Loop. But frankly, Carrie was just that. A girl of simple stories. She loved living her life, and she wanted nothing more than to be a perfectly normal girl without any special needs, without any of the special attention that comes to a sick child. She made those closest to her feel like the most special people in the world. She wanted to be healthy and leave this whole thing behind as a bad memory. The cancer was a bad memory, but the only thing I will try to remember about Carrie is how she made me feel, which was absolutely full.