In Memory

Karen Joy Bartlett



 
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02/23/09 06:02 PM #1    

Marcus Mitchell

I really don't know what to say or even how to say it...Karen was such a gentle, creative person. What a wonderful soul...too great to ever be confined by any container no matter how lovely. Her eyes were almost cat-like...and her smile...I can see it now. Sometimes a few of us would go to her house and she would play Joni Mitchell albums...COURT AND SPARK. I think she burned incense. She always seemed a bit delicate to me...it breaks my heart that she was injured and lived with constant pain. I've always thought that pain is the opposite of life, more so than death in many ways. The strangest thing occured to me when I heard that she had died...I realized that I loved her. I never kissed her, I never even held her hand, and I never envied those who did. I loved her in my own innocent/inept way and I'm very grateful for her life and her love and her uncompromised soul. She was a true gift and I miss her.

10/27/12 06:58 PM #2    

John Coffey

I want to honor my sweet friend, now beyond pain.

Several years have passed since Karen's death and it is easier now to reflect upon it and her life.  She and I were close friends through high school and college, though that closeness was highly fraught.  Brilliant and wildly imaginative, Karen was also severely afflicted by nameless demons.  I never knew all their names.  She masked a fragile mentality with bravado and an almost giddy delight in everything and everyone around her.  She could be delightful company, dancing down a sidewalk or engaging in lively, wayward talk about books, art, politics—all the things that mattered to us.  But Karen did not suffer fools, especially smart fools.  And the world then as now was a foolish place.  Perhaps because of her own pain Karen offered an inexhaustible compassion to others.  She embraced Zen Buddhism with un-Buddhist ardor, but that was Karen.  For her, life was all or nothing.

Literature was Karen’s passion.  At Broughton she would assume the persona of a doomed poet. She wrote darkly. The heroine of one of her gothic stories was named portentously Anastasia Gray.  (With a name like that you just knew she was ill-fated.)  After Broughton Karen gradually lost interest in her own creative writing and turned to the study of other writers.  She became a scholar of modern literature (Ph.D., University of Georgia). She had a special affinity for the lyrical mysteries of W.B. Yeats and wrote thoughtfully on “The American Buddhist Poetics of Gary Snyders.” Unfortunately, recurring bouts of mental illness thwarted Karen’s academic career.  Her last years were a downward spiral: a succession of menial jobs, desperate poverty, and increasing disability.

After nearly thirty years, I reconnected with Karen the last year of her life.  Responding to a plea from Jeff Bredenberg, I sent her some money.  This initiated a phone conversation, then meetings and a few dinners with my family.  To our surprise, Karen and I discovered that we were still friends, open to tenderness and trusting in confidences.  But that friendship was also complicated by Karen’s overwhelming neediness. I found her living in a single room in an old house at the end of Cox Avenue.  The room was stark, pale white, like a convent cell; but there was no serenity there.  All her possessions huddled in those four walls: a palette bed, a shelf of books, boxes of papers, ink brush paintings and figurines of the ever-calm Buddha.

Of course, she had no car.  A leg injury prevented her from walking but short distances.  She had given up finding work. I tried to convince her to see a doctor, therapist or social worker—anyone who might ease her life.  She refused, tossing off well-rehearsed reasons: lack of transportation, lack of insurance, missing documentation, etc., etc., all of them solvable, but in her mind overwhelming.  In the end, Karen made it clear she did not want help.  She was needy, but without need. Exasperated, I offered to assist with buying a computer to help her finish a book.  She only wanted $10 for wine.  When I refused, perhaps too indignantly, she simply cut me off.  Soon after she left for New Hampshire.  A few weeks later she died alone in the New England woods.

I apologize if this is not the expected tribute to a deceased classmate, but I doubt Karen would mind my telling this story.  She was someone for whom truth mattered. She spent much of her life on a pilgrimage to uncover that truth.  It eluded her.  She gave love freely, but refused to accept it from others.  Karen’s misfortune—her tragedy—was that she never--not once--allowed for herself the compassion she gave others. 

 


05/20/18 05:24 PM #3    

William Mixon

Ah, and here I am ten years after, just finding out about her passing.  Marcus and John have already spoken so well - they have expressed much of what I too feel. Karen was a rare spirit.  It was almost incredible that someone so delicate and beautiful could exist on this Earth, and I am grateful that she did, and that I experienced just a little bit of that existence.  Like Marcus, I think I was in love with her - not a romantic love, that seemed so impossible and out of reach, but a deeply felt Platonic love.  Karen just had a way of eliciting such feelings.  She loved her work and her studies - her middle name was so true - and it was a tragedy that she was unable to continue them. The world is a poorer place without her.


06/16/18 12:45 PM #4    

Anne Hodnett (Mejan)

 

I have little to offer, too little, too late. This delightful free spirit was a pleasure to be around, being a shining star that I admired ..bringing us all a bit closer to the freedom of being ourselves. We all secretly wished we could be so "free" .

 

 


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