Kate Bush: Conduit to memories of Kathy Stoner

Well so I made a mistake, stumbling onto some old Kate Bush mp3s in my iTunes library. Er..., and then dusting them off and taking them for an auditory spin. Yeah, well, so apparently 1987 wasn't so long ago after all, either that or time travel is a reality, in my mind.

In 1987 I lost a close friend who fell asleep on her way home from clubbing and crashed into a telephone pole in front of Wheeler Farm in Salt Lake City, Utah. I'd lost loved ones before that, so the idea that people can die wasn't new, but none of them hit me quite the way news of Kathy's tragic death did.

Despite the fact that it's been twenty years since the accident, her memory and my struggle to build meaning in the sandbox of ideas instilled through my parents efforts to bring me up religiously and the increasingly contrasting observations I tend toward naturally, I haven't reconciled anything internally. I think the ache just dulled with time, but is surprisingly accessible all these years later with triggers such as music my friends enjoyed around that time.

An unfortunate side note to the story is that I was morbidly inclined to search for Kathy's obit and instead stumbled across the obit of her mother who in my mind finally died heart broken after the loss of her teenage daughter so many years earlier. It really makes me question how anyone can believe certain things frankly.

I remember Eileen from when I was in high school and my friend Mona, myself, and Kathy got together at Kathy's house to work on a cover tune for our band. I also remember her pain at Kat's funeral.

All the same, I'm grateful that the combination of music, experiences, and the associative glue that binds it all together still works, even if the remembering only reopens the wound for me.