SALON

Tuesday, May 29, 2012 2:45 PM UTC

Parents: Sharing of Yale grad’s essay is a comfort

After the tragic death of a recent Yale graduate, readers from across the world find inspiration in her words

By

Topics: From the Wires, ,

Parents: Sharing of Yale grad's essay is a comfortThis undated photo released by the Keegan family shows Marina Keegan, left, and her brother Pierce, of Wayland, Mass. Marina, who graduated from Yale less than a week earlier, died at the scene of an automobile crash in Dennis, Mass., Saturday, May 26, 2012. Her writing had been published in The New York Times, and she had accepted a job at The New Yorker. Her final Yale Daily News column was widely shared on social media, where she had implored her classmates to "make something happen to this world." (AP Photo/Keegan Family)(Credit: AP)

WAYLAND, Mass. (AP) — “What we have to remember is that we can still do anything,” Marina Keegan wrote to fellow Yale University graduates. “… We can’t, we must not lose this sense of possibility because in the end, it’s all we have.”

Three days after the Yale alumna’s death in a car crash, her parents, Tracy and Kevin Keegan, said from their Massachusetts home that it was comforting that even strangers were drawing inspiration from their daughter’s words as her last newspaper column spread across the Internet.

“I would love my daughter’s words, few as they may be, to be shared,” Tracy Keegan said. “… That’s all that’s left of her now, her words.”

Yale Daily News Editor Max de La Bruyere said Tuesday that the newspaper put Keegan’s print column online as a tribute following her death Saturday on Cape Cod. He said it had gotten 400,000 hits on the newspaper’s website after first spreading through Yale students’ Facebook and Twitter accounts. The newspaper tracked readers as far away as Asia.

“It’s a huge outpouring of sympathy,” he said. “People are very moved by it.”

The 22-year-old’s column talked about anxiety that came with the feeling of losing the web of fellowship at Yale. She said what she wanted out of life was “the opposite of loneliness,” and encouraged classmates by saying “the best years of our lives are not behind us.”

“It’s not quite love and it’s not quite community,” the English major wrote of her time at Yale. “It’s just this feeling that there are people, an abundance of people, who are in this together.”

The Keegans said their daughter’s boyfriend, 22-year-old Michael Gocksch of Centerport, N.Y., fell asleep at the wheel while driving with her to their family’s summer place in Wellfleet on Cape Cod.

The young couple had been to Brookline earlier in the day so their daughter could introduce her boyfriend and fellow 2012 graduate to her grandmother. The couple was heading to a birthday dinner for Keegan’s father when she died. Gocksch was hospitalized in stable condition after the crash and later discharged.

Massachusetts State Police are still investigating the cause of the crash, which occurred on Route 6 in the town of Dennis. They said speed wasn’t a factor and both were wearing seatbelts. The vehicle drifted off the road and into guardrails on both sides of the road before flipping.

Keegan’s parents said she was about to start a job as an assistant to the general counsel at The New Yorker, where she interned last summer and got some of her work onto a magazine blog.

The New York Times also published a piece she wrote after another column she did for the Yale Daily News sparked a debate about why 25 percent of Yale graduates go into finance or consulting instead of pursuing employment more closely connected to their studies and aspirations.

Keegan had been the president of Yale College Democrats. She worked in New Hampshire in the summer of 2008 as one of the youngest paid staffers for the Obama presidential campaign, her parents said Tuesday while looking at a photo of their daughter with the president.

The Keegans spent graduation weekend with their daughter in New Haven, time they said they were grateful for as they prepare for her memorial Saturday at The First Parish in Wayland. They plan to spread her ashes in Cape Cod Bay.

Yale professor and literary critic Harold Bloom said Keegan had become like an adopted granddaughter to him after serving as his research assistant for the past two years. He taught her seminars in Shakespeare and American poetry and called her senior essay about the poet John Keats’ influence on author F. Scott Fitzgerald’s work “quite publishable.”

In August, a musical that Keegan wrote will be staged in New York City as part of The New York International Fringe Festival, fellow 2012 Yale graduate and project collaborator Mark Sonnenblick said.

Called “Independents,” the play is about a group of 20-somethings smuggling drugs on a Revolutionary War-era ship while posing as war re-enactors. When the posse’s leader disappears, the friends try to become real re-enactors.

Sonnenblick, who wrote the show’s lyrics, said the script is about transitioning to adulthood and maintaining community and relationships, themes that embodied much of Keegan’s writing.

“These are things Marina didn’t necessarily have answers for,” Sonnenblick said. “She took on issues she was concerned about and happened to her and her friends.”

The Yale graduate said it like this in her last column: “We’re in this together, 2012. Let’s make something happen to this world.”

___

Online:

Keegan’s essay: http://www.yaledailynews.com/news/2012/may/27/keegan-opposite-loneliness/?cross-campus

More Bridget Murphy.

Next Article

Related Stories

More Related Stories

Featured Slide Shows

The week in 10 pics

close X
  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 11
  • Lisa Montgomery embraces her nephew Thursday after a tornado tore apart her home in Cleburne, Texas. The twister killed six people and destroyed entire swaths of the North Texas town.
    Credit: AP/LM Otero

  • Jack McMahon, the defense attorney for abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell, speaks outside the Criminal Justice Center in Philadelphia Tuesday. His client was convicted of killing three babies in his clinic, and will serve multiple life sentences.
    Credit: AP/Matt Rourke

  • A photo taken Monday captures Vice President Joe Biden's response to a Milwaukee second-grader's innovative proposal to end America's epidemic of gun violence. This guy!
    Credit: AP/Jenny Aicher

  • Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., flanked by a grouper-eyed Michele Bachmann, addresses the IRS' admission that it targeted Tea Party groups in advance of the 2012 election. In an op-ed for CNN Thursday, the Kentucky senator slammed the president for his faux outrage.
    Credit: AP/Molly Riley

  • Ousted IRS chief Steven Miller is sworn in on Capitol Hill Friday. Miller testified before the House Ways and Means Committee on the extra scrutiny the agency gave conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status.
    Credit: AP/J. Scott Applewhite

  • Attorney General Eric Holder pauses as he testifies on Capitol Hill before the House Judiciary Committee Wednesday. Holder is under fire, among other things, for the Justice Department's gathering of phone records at the Associated Press.
    Credit: AP/Carolyn Kaster

  • O.J. Simpson sits during an evidentiary hearing at Clark County District Court in Las Vegas, Nev., Thursday. Simpson, who is currently serving a nine-to-33-year sentence in state prison for armed robbery and kidnapping, is using a writ of habeas corpus to seek a new trial.
    Credit: AP/Las Vegas Review-Journal/Jeff Scheid

  • Major Tom to ground control: On Sunday astronaut Chris Hadfield recorded the first music video from space, a cover of David Bowie's "Space Oddity."
    Credit: AP/NASA/Chris Hadfield

  • When it rains it pours. President Barack Obama speaks during a news conference Thursday with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, inexplicably inspiring an #umbrellagate Twitter meme.
    Credit: AP/Jacquelyn Martin

  • A smoke plume rises high above a road block at the intersection of County A and Ross Road east of Solon Springs, Wis., Tuesday. No injuries were reported, but the the wildfire caused evacuations across northwestern Wisconsin.
    Credit: AP/The Duluth News-Tribune/Clint Austin

  • Recent Slide Shows

  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 11

Related Videos

Comments

 0 Comments

Comment Preview

Your name will appear as username

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href=""> <b> <em> <strong> <i> <blockquote>

follow salon

Most Read

Popular on Reddit

links from salon.com

From Around the Web

Presented by Scribol
listener_new_rect The Listener: So long, Sookie Stackhouse

Recommendations