Fine Feathered Friends

Ducky on her wedding day. Photo by Amaris Photography.

This is a hard entry to write, because it deals with death. Normally death isn't hard for me to write about, a lot of the themes in my stories deal with death in various forms. Death in real life, however, is something that takes a while. The words don't form as easily as the tears do. There are more emotions bound up like braided hair and only with time does it come untangled.

My friend Rachael died.

I called her Duckling or Ducky. Rarely ever did I call her by her given name. There was no reason for this- it's just how we were. She called me silly otter. I called her Ducky.

We met in college. There were professors and friends who had been telling me for a while that there was a freshman artist that I needed to meet. When we finally did get to hang out we instantly bonded and couldn't be separated for very long.

Ducky was one of the few people at college I didn't feel like I had to hide from. There were others of course, I was blessed with a tiny abundance of beautiful and brilliant beings that didn't mind calling me a friend. Some things were different with Ducky. She didn't communicate well through words, or so she said, but she could communicate through colors and compositions. She followed the light and the shadow with her camera and captured the mundane in such a way that it looked extraordinary. I learned to see the world around me differently, and felt a little less alone for it. She would shake her head and smile and tell me that I was crazy. Somehow we endeared ourselves to the other.

Photo by Amaris Photography.

She would come to my room late at night and stay until the early hours of the morning. I sketched her once and the picture is framed and hanging in my kitchen as it has been for the past five years. I look at it with new meaning now. She is sitting on a pile of junk I had heaped up in an unused corner of the room. I had hubcaps that I decorated the wall with, and art supplies strewn around the floor with empty boxes and godonlyknows what else. She sat content on her hoodie she used as a cushion, and with her drawing board that was half her size she sat and worked out a composition that she was never satisfied with but was always one of the most beautiful things she ever did. I sat from my bed and watched her as she worked in spurts of sighs and reveries. My sketch wasn't perfect either, by anyone's standards, but it was raw and beautiful and real. It is one of my favorite pieces I have ever done.

Photo by Amaris Photography.

I have other pieces of her throughout my home. In the living room there's a painting that I finished the night she and the aforementioned mutual friend came up to spend the night. I was living in my apartment above the Bistro, the apartments that once upon a time had been a brothel, and we drank vodka and talked and danced and played Dana Fuchs until the wee hours of the morning. When both my guests had collapsed from exhaustion, I kept on playing music and drinking and began to paint.

The painting had been one that had me stumped for about two years or more. I hadn't finished it because I couldn't get the colors I wanted to use bright enough to suit me. After seeing some of Ducky's work I decided to change the color scheme and loosen up my brushstrokes. What emerged is the painting that turned the tide in my confidence and in my artwork. It's literally everyone's favorite piece of mine and one of the few I've hung up with sheer pride. All because of Ducky.

In the bathroom is the rubber ducky that I took from my senior prank at Meredith. I bought 107 pirate rubber duckies and nine of us sneaked out into the quad at three in the morning to dump them in the water fountain. It was a memorable event, and each of us took a souvenir ducky with us.

In the bedroom is probably the most meaningful piece of memorabilia that I have, and also the only piece that was from Ducky herself. I framed it a long time ago and have it sitting on the chest where I keep my photos and my journals. A letter she had written me two months before my graduation, telling me how she loved me and my words and how she was going to miss me when I left. She told me to keep writing, and quoted a line from my own poem as well as Robin Williams. (She knew me well, safe to say.) She signed it <3, Ducky in orange marker.

 I was standing at the sink in the bathroom getting ready for the day when I got the news. A friend of ours had been keeping some of us in the loop in regards to Ducky's status over the past several months over Facebook. It seemed weird to me at the time to get such news over Facebook, but there it was. I started sobbing instantly and had to ring my mom up at work to have someone to talk to. Mom cried with me and soothed me as best as she could, and after we hung up I slumped onto the couch and cried. It was cardiac arrest we were told. Not uncommon for those who have been immobile for so long. My mother explained that it was likely a clot that had traveled to her heart.

Ducky and her husband, Steve, on their wedding day. Photo by Amaris Photography.

 It would be easy to sit here and talk only about my suffering and how much I miss her. But someone like Ducky doesn't leave behind only one person to grieve the loss of her life. She left behind a colorful legacy and a beautiful husband and daughter and numerous others who won't forget how much she touched our lives and meant to us. In college, people told me that Ducky was lucky to have me around, but in reality it was the other way around. We were all very lucky to have a friend like Duckling.