This past weekend, three Marist College students lost their lives in an off campus fire. Yesterday the college hosted a memorial for them. It was a beautiful service and even though I didn’t know these three as more than friends of friends, it was incredibly touching. After the service, I felt the overwhelming need to be in a place that felt like home. I’ve read that grieving is a complicated process and different people react very differently. My reaction is to normalize myself, to fool myself into thinking that this bad day is just any other day. Here at Marist, the place where I feel the most at home is the boathouse.
Marist’s boathouse isn’t fancy or state of the art. We don’t have tanks or locker rooms. The paint is peeling, the pictures are faded, the plaques are falling off the wall. The pieces of furniture look like an assortment of the best of garage sales and basement cleanouts. The weights are dusty and the mats are stained with who knows what. The stairs got painted this summer because the janitor told me she was “tired of washing them all the time and they still look dirty”. No matter how many coats of paint later, she will likely always have that problem. But I consider this building my home away from home.
Having spent two summers and three winter breaks in Poughkeepsie, I have probably spent more time at this boathouse than anyone except for the coaching staff. The place is full of memories for me. I remember the first time I came, as a sophomore in high school, looked at the erg scores on the board and thought “woah, these girls are fast”. I remember as a sophomore in college when I looked at the erg scores on the board and thought “woah, I actually got pretty fast” and then I remember looking at the board two weeks ago and thinking “woah, these underclassmen are fast”. It was at the boathouse where one summer I learned to row a single, and then the next summer when I learned to row it well. It was here that I stood on the balcony in a thunderstorm at 7:30am one morning after a PR, just staring at the lightning in the sky and feeling invincible.
Some days, I hate going to the boathouse. I wake up and wish that I could go back to sleep and forget what an erg is forever. It was here that on the third day of practice my freshman year we did a 75’ erg piece and I didn’t think I was going to survive college rowing. It was outside the boathouse where I ran hills almost in tears after not getting boated the way I wanted to. It was the boathouse that I have left in a cranky mood because a teammate was pissing me off. It is still the boathouse where I sit, begrudgingly, on the erg that has been “mine” for three years, praying to hear those four awesome words that signify another sweat-soaked practice is over: “Clean off your ergs”.
Yet for all the painful memories I have, the good ones outweigh them ten to one. The friendships I have made under that roof are the strongest friendships I’ve ever made. I know that I will be able to call these people up in ten, twenty, thirty years and say something like “Remember that day that we got waked so badly that we had to bail out the boat with our shoes?” Or “Remember the time when we played that really good April Fool’s joke on Tom?” Or “Remember that freak hurricane/windstorm where the freshmen had to be rescued?” Or “Remember that practice where we were supposed to do pieces but then we followed a teenage bald eagle around the river instead?” And we’re going to laugh hysterically and walk around smiling for the rest of the day, because the memories are that good.
Yesterday, I spent a long time in the boathouse. I read a little bit, I daydreamed, I accidentally fell asleep, I ate lunch, I talked to the rowers and coaches who wandered in and out. I procrastinated the things that I should have been doing with things I wanted to do, like staring at the Hudson and listening to the ice crack as the pieces bumped into each other. Because life is too short, and in four months, Marist won’t be my home anymore. If anything, the recent events have made me remember to try to live life to the fullest every single day, to tell my friends, family and teammates how much I care and appreciate them, and to take joy in the little things, the big things and everything in between. So yesterday, instead of doing homework, I stared at the river and hoped that in heaven, there is a place as special as the boathouse for Kevin, Kerry and Eva and that one day, we will all join them there. Rest in peace.
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