Wayland To Remember Yale Grad

Saturday afternoon in Wayland, family and friends of Marina Keegan will gather for her funeral.

The 22-year-old recent graduate of Yale University died last Saturday in a car accident on Route 6 on Cape Cod.

Five days earlier, she had been on top of the world — an Ivy League degree in hand, magna cum laude. Keegan was a gifted writer, actress and campus activist, and she had been preparing to move to New York City for a job at the New Yorker magazine.

Her final writing assignment was an essay for her Yale classmates that was published in the graduation issue of the Yale Daily News.

Excerpt From Marina Keegan's "The Opposite Of Loneliness"

We don’t have a word for the opposite of loneliness, but if we did, I could say that’s what I want in life. What I’m grateful and thankful to have found at Yale, and what I’m scared of losing when we wake up tomorrow and leave this place.

It’s not quite love and it’s not quite community; it’s just this feeling that there are people, an abundance of people, who are in this together. Who are on your team. When the check is paid and you stay at the table. When it’s four a.m. and no one goes to bed. That night with the guitar. That night we can’t remember. That time we did, we went, we saw, we laughed, we felt. The hats.

Yale is full of tiny circles we pull around ourselves. A cappella groups, sports teams, houses, societies, clubs. These tiny groups that make us feel loved and safe and part of something even on our loneliest nights when we stumble home to our computers — partner-less, tired, awake. We won’t have those next year. We won’t live on the same block as all our friends. We won’t have a bunch of group-texts.

This scares me. More than finding the right job or city or spouse – I’m scared of losing this web we’re in. This elusive, indefinable, opposite of loneliness. This feeling I feel right now.