KELLI DUNHAM

at B is for Beautiful: A Memorial for Cheryl B.

I want to start by saying thank you for your incredible support.

One of the residents in the ICU started calling it “Cheryl’s army” the sheer volume of people that came through, checking on her, checking on us, bringing food, games, conversation, and even in Derrick’s case, a working blue self contained chandelier.

We never sent out an email to Cheryl’s list that wasn’t answered with at least the double the amount of help we needed: rides, contacts, ideas, meals. And folks who are far away helped as well, financially, with research (1700 citations about bleomyocin toxicity from premed students at Umass alone), contributing to the Fresh Direct gift certificate that essentially kept us fed all winter, sending little gifts, or sweet emails that made Cheryl laugh. I’m especially touched by the folks in Cheryl’s life who didn’t even really know me, but took a special interest in making sure I was okay as I could be. So many times, especially in the early weeks of her hospitalization where things seemed so up and down and back and forth so quickly, I would often find myself with a hamburger in one hand and a diet mountain dew in another, thinking, “wait how did this get here?”

Of course the outcome of all this is not what any of us wanted or anticipated. When I was thinking of what I would say today, I remembered the conversation that Cheryl and I had in January of 2010 right after the Haiti earthquake. We were still waiting to hear who of folks I knew there were okay and who wasn’t and she woke up one night to find me hunched over my laptop looking at pictures of the tragedy. I said “is the entire point of life just to reinforce over and over again the knowledge that you can do nothing to save the people you love!” She looked at me for a long time and said “um, saving those you love is sooo last year. All the cool people just settle for annoying people they hate.” She kissed me on the top of the head and said “get back in bed and stop looking at those awful pictures.”

To me, that remark was quintessential cynical Cheryl. Let’s be real: some of Cheryl’s sarcastic clever cynicism which we all appreciated so much was honed by her real frustration not only at the world, but her place in it, at not having accomplished what she wanted to.

Yet as I watched her this past year open up in a way I hadn’t seen her before, let people know how they could help, and receive that help with a simple vulnerability I also watched her grow into the love of her community. This amazing, wonderful, community that is gathered here today.

The week Cheryl died, one of the nursing assistants at the rehab brought her a peanut butter sandwich. She turned to me, smiled and said “aren’t people so good” I waited for the punchline, thinking this was a sarcastic comment and would be following by the context, perhaps a news item about a serial killer in the midwest or a brutal dictator or an employer who wouldn’t hire her because she was overqualified.. The only context was simply that Cheryl had grown into the love of her community and was experiencing all the people who moved through her world a little bit differently.

We couldn’t do anything, even with all of our efforts, to save this person we loved. But someone who really struggled also had the experience of knowing they were very loved. It’s beyond a cliché, but at the same time, there are many people who die a lot older than Cheryl who never have this experience.

As a consolation prize,  it’s kind of fucked up, it doesn’t make this not a disgusting terrible tragedy. But it is also much much more than nothing and I wanted to share this today so that everyone who reached to us over this past year would know that it mattered, that it did make a difference.