For My Friend, Andrea

Andrea Kabourek was a warrior.  An eyes-on-the-prize, cancer-be-damned warrior.  So what’s a middling, “uncle”-muttering person like me doing, talking about her? I’m here to tell you that, underneath all of those parachutes and running shoes, tucked behind the shark cage and bravado, Andrea Kabourek was just a really fine friend to people, myself included.

Granted, there were times when I questioned the ways in which Andrea expressed her friendship to me...usually, those times fell in October, when I host the annual East HIgh party, or December, on my birthday.  She was a horrible prankster in my life.  A wonderful, horrible prankster who once filled my house with hundreds of yearbook mugshots--some of which I am still finding 7 years later.  She rearranged my furniture, sent me strange notes on official letterhead, posted formative and summative assignments in my bathroom and bedroom. Andrea even made me wear a onesie to school on my 50th birthday. . .

There are not many people who can make me wear a onesie to school.  In fact, I’m pretty sure Andrea was the only one who could.

While Andrea always seemed to be in the center of things, she was not a team of one.  She had, it turns out, an incredible group of people holding her up and rooting her on--from her high-school and college coaches who nudged speed and strength out of her to her always-present family, who worked feverishly to keep her happily on this earth.  As stubborn and independent as she was, Andrea Kabourek needed her family and her friends, her coaches and her students just as much as we needed her, I think.

Andrea was not particularly religious, but I think she would have called East High her “thin” place--a Celtic term for those special places where this world and the next intertwine. She loved this school and its people fiercely.  And we loved her back.  

But it’s not a terribly brave or daring thing to have loved Andrea Kabourek.  Loving her is easy.

There is, it turns out, a much more difficult task for all of us today.  Today, the heartbreaking question becomes:  What do we do now?  How do we find our way without her?  

I am not a runner but I think Andrea the competitor would tell us that we get out of bed and put on our shoes and move through this day--each day-- with our eyes--and our hearts--wide open, grabbing fistfuls of this life and living it, heartache be damned.

Today, then, in this thin place that is East High, as my friend Ken said so well, we draw strength from each other, leaning in to this mystical thinness, a place where, as Andrea had shown us so many times before, anything is possible.