Probably not the way she wanted to be remembered

After I read the latest issue of the college alumni magazine, I had to root through my file drawers to find this distinctive sentence from a student paper:

Images of thin pouty-lipped models are thrown into our faces every few seconds, forcing that piece of equal pie we’ve longed for to be thrown up into that holy grail, deemed the toilet, of problems and insecurities, the toilet called society and the problem labeled bulimia.

Even though it's been 13 years since the student who wrote that sentence graduated, and even though I've had no contact with her and in fact have rarely even thought about her in all those years, I can still remember the day she turned in that draft, and I even remember what she said when I challenged her bizarre and perhaps too vivid use of metaphor: "I wanted it to sound like something out of Cosmo."

And that, sad to say, is my clearest memory of my former student who, according to the alumni magazine, died over the summer. 

She was an English major so I know I had her in several classes, but what I remember most is that she wrote in colorful inks on rainbow paper and that she was never afraid to ask whatever question popped into her mind, no matter how ridiculous. I found this refreshing. So what if she wasn't a particularly deep thinker? She would happily talk about whatever text was in front of her face and if she didn't like it, she would clearly explain why. 

The alumni magazine revealed nothing except the date of her death, and the online obituary revealed very little more: she was 36, had been married at one point, had a son and step-daughter and loved music and animals. None of this is particularly surprising.

What's surprising, of course, is that she's dead. It seems wrong for students to die before their teachers, but if she hadn't died, I probably would have spent the rest of my life continuing to not think about her. Now that I know she's dead, I can't get her out of my head. I think of those colorful pens and curious questions, but most of all I think of that piece of equal pie being thrown up into the toilet called society. So what if it's a ridiculous sentence? It's evidence of a creative mind trying to find its voice. 

And now it's silenced.