Mama Marina

for Sarah Kritner Perkins, BFF&E

After rehearsal for my high school graduation, Mr. Lilly insisted on making a revision to my speech. I’d prepared myself for pushback when I wove a thinly disguised jab at the guidance counselor into a Mark Twain quote about how only small people belittle your ambitions. I was not prepared to have a simple line about my best friend since kindergarten hijacked by sentimentality. 

This was decidedly off brand for me, which our Civics teacher would have known had he known literally anything about me. Before that conversation, I doubt he knew my name, much less how little I did feelings. But I knew him and his reputation. So, I felt certain he didn’t do them either and appealed to reason. 

I knew who she was. She knew who she was. Anyone who knew her–which was everyone–had surely seen the hobbit-sized shadow tailing a real-life version of Gumby through the hallways at several points over the last twelve years. Taller and thinner than felt fair to me at the time, she was also too kind to be bullied. She’d have made bullies cry within minutes by offering first apologies. Not only could you not miss her, you couldn’t not love her.

I rested my case. He reminded me of the thousand-plus family members in the room who knew f*ck all about me, Sarah, and our Merry Band of Misfits. Which, fair. But it would have been easier to name our counselor sitting stage center (No hard feelings, Mrs. Palmer!).

His scribbled line on my script—“Sarah Kritner, I will never forget you.”—felt as vulnerable and obvious as declaring I was, in fact, still a virgin. I was certain I would vomit the words rather than speak them. I sat back down and listened to the valedictorian read, Oh, The Places You’ll Go!, for her speech, and I wondered why the f*ck no one told me that was a thing you could do. That I could have saved myself hours and now-certain humiliation through a simple Ctrl+P of Twain’s 1882 Advice to Youth.

~

It’s not that I didn’t love the girl who had been my most constant companion the past 12 years. Just a few days prior, I’d rushed to the hospital as soon as I learned of her car wreck the night before. I arrived to find a girl I barely recognized, laughing the laugh I’d know anywhere. That Sarah was able to hobble across the stage on crutches shortly after that was a damn miracle.

The day of the ceremony, I was still unsure if I would “remember” or “forget” the teacher’s addition. I thought of nothing else from the moment I walked on stage till the breath before I said the words—awkwardly and with a catch in my voice, the only way I knew how to share my feelings at the age of 17.

Sarah cried. Because of course, Sarah cried. That was her thing.

She came by wearing her emotions as honestly as I came by concealing mine. Textbook middle child of three girls, she cried when her four-year-old sister thought we were too lame to play with, while I was content to have Sarah just to myself.

“She came by wearing her emotions as honestly as I came by concealing mine.”

I was the typical youngest child, especially because with a five-year age gap, my older brother had little reason to tolerate me. By second grade, Sarah was the adopted middle child of my family too, though thankfully and deliberately spared the harder days. Still, on Sarah Sleepover days, which were the best days, I played the petulant little sister to my three-months senior bestie, always having to pick the movies, win every game, and start all the fights. Her, always letting me. Then opening the refrigerator as wide as our eyes to find soda and lunchables on nearly-full shelves, and only in hindsight can I see those Fridays were paydays. 

~

For much of our childhood, she was the sensitive jester to my equally-sensitive brood. It wasn’t that I didn’t do feelings as much as I trapped them in diaries I would call journals in middle school and pen into emo poetry in high school. My faux-stoicism was likely as convincing as Sarah’s serious face. 

Sarah made me fall in love with the sound of my own laughter even when it made me snort; and I let her cry the tears just for her and not the world she so dearly loved back. For many years, she was the sole witness to my own.

“Sarah made me fall in love with the sound of my own laughter even when it made me snort…”

When she made other friends, I hated them all, but I did stop trying to push them off swings around first grade. When she moved away for part of middle school, I wandered the halls like a ghost, cried in the bathrooms, and then eventually grew into a person who could make a few other friends, giving her space for the new ones she’d immediately made in Florida. Because, of course, she did.

When Sarah came back a year later, she, her sisters, and her mom wept openly at her father’s funeral. I’d thought of that when I wrote the only college essay to earn me a personal email from someone in Admissions. Given the chance to write a futuristic memoir essay, I couldn’t pass up painting myself stoic when my dad inevitably died from his addiction. In retrospect, maybe Mr. Roberts was just worried about me. 

And anyway, I was wrong. I did weep. On a late morning in May, fourteen years after giving that graduation speech. In my therapist’s office at the intensive outpatient program where I’d been pussyfooting on whether to get sober. On the same morning she’d called me out for studying the strangers in group instead of sharing with them. 

What’s it going to take for you to be vulnerable? 

Though she didn’t accept my offer to come drunk tomorrow, she did laugh. Which had, in my mind, won the argument. That is, until an unexpected series of calls in the middle of group had me heavy-sobbing in the hallway–in front of God, nurses, and every member of all five groups who hadn’t made it to the exits yet. That no-bullshit therapist pulled me into a hug, then her office, where I cried some more.

Sarah was the first friend I told about my recovery. Though we didn’t talk frequently during our adult years, we spoke most deeply when we did. I’d seen her post for years about her substance use recovery, even her slips and relapses–a vulnerability I still find hard to brave two years into owning my own recovery in public. And she did it, because of course, she did. That was just Sarah. It was no more shameful to her than announcing a fart.

“Better out than in,” I can still hear her say every time my son cackles while aiming a fart toward my face.

Because she would haunt me if I didn’t sneak a reference to one of her fart jokes into this eulogy, so everyone laughs as much as they cry that today is one year too many of her absent fart jokes.

~

There are relationships you choose in life and relationships life chooses for you. Sarah and I were one of the latter–bound by some sort of gravity keeping us in each other’s orbits despite having little in common except for age and an unusual attachment to orcas we never outgrew. The last time I saw her, we had our last orca-drawing contest, and I know without memory she told me I won. 

That was the summer of 2023, and she was pregnant with her youngest daughter. Without trying, we’d managed to almost perfectly align our children’s ages and sexes. My Jack, her Roman. Both four—around the age Sarah and I met, and also just a few months apart. They were in a tug-of-war over Jack’s hot wheels, and we took turns scolding and laughing before deciding no one should have hot wheels. Her Joselyn and my Cece screamed and laughed while they ran laps of aimless chase and then joined the boys in playing jumping monkeys on the bed.

We put on our favorite nostalgic movie, Now and Then, which she warned me would make her “sappy” by the opening credits. Sarah shifted as Lydia kickboxed her womb; my youngest, Lyla, nestled in, lulled to sleep by the chaos. We saw the movie in bits and bursts–in the way only young lovers, old friends, and parents of toddlers watch movies. We talked about our recoveries, the struggles of early motherhood, how we couldn’t wait to watch all six run around her yard the next time I visited home.

And we talked about the weird things we did to make each other laugh. Tape-recorder confessions of our most embarrassing stories and deepest, darkest secrets in elementary school. In 8th grade, fake-falling up stairs à la Laney Boggs from She’s All That, as though embracing our dorkiness would baptize us into the manic pixie dream girls the boys noticed. And that time she tried the bit near a mud puddle on the track and pulled us both in. She laughed even harder at the fact that I wouldn’t laugh, and I’m sure I nursed that grudge till we met on the borderlands of car-riders and bus-riders to share gossip and goodbyes for the day.

“She laughed even harder at the fact that I wouldn’t laugh…”

No eulogy is complete without a quote, and though I tried to dig up something witty or profound to close with, I must admit Dr. Seuss said it best.

“We are all a little weird and life’s a little weird, and when we find someone whose weirdness is compatible with ours, we join up with them and fall in mutual weirdness and call it love.”

Sarah Kritner, I will never forget you. I love you, Kri Krit.

Love,

(and only because I love you)

Moo Moo

<3

P.S.

I’m not crying, you’re crying.