Marian Elaine Myers

I wish the internets had been big back in the '80s so there'd be an online record of Marian, my best friend in college. My first roommate away from home. My mentor in being a disabled girl out in the world.

She died 18 years ago today.

She was waiting for me when I arrived at the dorm with my mother and a breathless freshman naiveté. She was excited to meet me and become friends. She taught me how to ride the public buses with their brand new wheelchair lifts and ignorant drivers. She introduced me to crip culture. She was my best friend. She was hilarious and wise.

Her life had always been hard. She never knew her birth father, he'd left Marian's mother alone and in poverty. When Marian's juvenile rheumatoid arthritis became critically expensive, Michigan's child protective services took her away from her Mom and siblings and stuck her in foster care. Some homes were good, some were cruel. She spent time in hospitals and at Easter Seals camp. She almost died in a house fire once.

At 16, some kind neighbors apparently helped her just leave the unhappy home she was in and fly across the country to her mother, siblings and a new step-dad. Well, she always described it as a flight, an escape. She was emotionally intense. She'd learned early that you have to hold tight to the ones you love.

This dreamy blind guy once carried her up "A mountain" -- the very large rocky desert hillside bordering campus -- to watch an Arizona sunset. She was a semester away from getting her psychology degree when she died. She was going to counsel troubled teens. Someday she planned to have children. She'd already outlived all life-expectancy estimates, but she had big dreams.

She was generous and thoughtful. She entered the hospital on my 21st birthday and died there three weeks later on November 8, 1989. She left behind birthday presents she hadn't had a chance to give me, and already-wrapped Christmas presents for many people, anticipating the holidays.

She never lived to see implementation of the ADA.

I didn't take many pictures. I didn't know how little time we had. But this is Marian in our dorm room (my sophomore, her junior year) preparing to brave an Arizona monsoon rain (yes, she's sitting in front of that closet door). She's a short blond woman sitting in an Everest & Jennings motorized chair wearing one of those clear plastic "scarfs" over her hair and a white trash bag over her lap. The sink and closed door of our dorm room are behind her, with a life-sized poster of Patrick Swayze on the door.

And these last two photos were taken exactly one year before she entered the hospital. My 20th birthday. She gave me the stuffed purple dinosaur, Sam, and took me to dinner while other friends toilet-papered our room. We're with Anne, from that "pickle for three". In the first photo, Marian smiles at the camera. She's wearing a light blue tie-dyed t-shirt dress and holding my stuffed dinosaur, which has a toilet paper bow around it's neck. My bed behind her has a pink quilt and posters on the wall above it including one of Sting and one that says "Peace".

In the second photo, Anne, Marian and I sit at a restaurant table with glasses of wine and happy smiles. Anne is a tiny woman sitting in an Amigo scooter. I've got Veronica Lake hair and an embarrassingly large turquoise bolo necklace. I'm also drinking in a restaurant while underage because no one had the nerve to card a bunch of noisy women in wheelchairs.

I cannot believe it has been 18 years. I was so alone at college after she died that I nearly dropped out. For better and worse, my undergrad years were, emotionally, all about my friendship with Marian. Her joyful friendship, clingy intensity, illness, and the enduring grief.

She's so far away. So close. I often forget this anniver- sary. It was a sunny day when the painful vigil ended. My October birthday, her first day in the hospital and away from me forever, was the day I really lost her and the day I truly started to become an adult. This is pretty maudlin, but I haven't thought deeply about Marian for a while now, though she was clever enough that my family quotes her frequently. Even when I don't mention her name, she's a presence everywhere on this blog.