All shamrocks and Red Sox

By Matt Vautour

I spent part of yesterday sitting in Casey's Holyoke bedroom. Her parents generously told me to take anything I felt a special connection to.

The temptation was to return with a van and leave with half the room. Almost every-thing in the room holds some significance. From the sweater in her drawer that she wore on our first date to the happy pink hat that she had on when we went to lunch earlier this month.

The bedroom was Casey, all shamrocks and Red Sox. A photo of cancer survivor Lance Armstrong was displayed not far from a bag of unfinished medication, the image of her hero just inches from the tools of her fight.

Moonlight Graham could walk past a hat shop without buying his wife a blue one. Casey always laughed at that scene in Field of Dreams. Casey’s “blue hats” were address books and photo albums. She had scores of both lying around her room. Every trip to the mall seemed to include a purchase of one or the other.

Most of the address books were filled out to at least C, maybe D, until she'd found a new one, with a shiny cover to capture her attention.

The scrapbooks weren’t just photos stuck to a page. These were artwork, with fancy back-ground paper and her inscriptions written in fancy marker.

She's always loved to pick a theme and create the perfect photo album. Her room was filled with albums for every-thing from the Collegian to baseball trips to Kane family history. The books are stacked on her dresser and piled on her bedside table.

There are boxes and piles of more photos and empty albums that she never got to. I smiled through tears for a most of the late afternoon as I went through them, trying not to get fingerprints on them.

You're all in the photos. Chances are if you knew her well enough to read this site, there’s a picture of you and Casey, smiling together, in one of the scrapbooks.

I wonder if she knew that putting those albums together that she was creating a illustrated history of her life and people that she cared about. I think she was always more aware of her own mortality that she let on. Put those books in the right order and you have her autobiography in smiles.

I’ve gotten a lot of advice and words of comfort in the past 12 days. The best of all of it came in an e-mail from a co-worker.

“The reason we feel such deep sorrow is because we felt such deep joy. Without joy there is no sorrow; they are, in a way, the result of the same thing. In a way, you are privi-leged to feel such sorrow.”

He’s right. I feel privileged to be in a lot of those photos. I feel privileged to have sat next to her at countless ball games and have the Kodak paper to prove it.

I feel privileged that she sought me out to celebrate of some of her greatest days and for comfort in some of her darkest hours. I feel lucky to have spent her final days with her.

I’m just sad there won’t be more.