My friend Nadia Seiler died on Friday when her moped collided with a truck in Washington, D.C. All weekend Ive been thinking about how to comprehend the randomness of this (if it can be comprehended -- I lean toward no), and how best to mourn her. And I thought in the end the most useful thing might be to share some memories of Nadia, for her fiance and her family and anyone else to whom she was dear at all the various stages and places of her life, and to try to keep her present for myself by writing this down: I met Nadia in September 1996 at Carleton College, in our freshman English seminar, Narrative Necessity. She was thin and elegant, with wire-framed glasses, long black hair, and already a fine collection of orange and red shirts, dresses, and sweaters -- two colors she looked wonderful in and wore often, frequently in combination with black. She impressed me instantly as someone who looked and talked the way an English major should -- she drank coffee, she already adored the work of James Joyce and Vladimir Nabokov, and if I recall correctly, she knew some Latin and Greek. Plus she was from Boston and played the cello -- all hugely intimidating to a Midwestern public-school girl like me! But she was funny and warm (and a little nervous too, I think, those first days at Carleton), with a rat-a-tat laugh that slid up the scale to a giggle that always made me giggle as well. She studied abroad in France and Ireland and played in the orchestra for Carletons musicals, and we took many of our English major courses together, revelling in the reading and occasionally rolling our eyes at blowhard professors or other students. In our senior year, she wrote her senior comps (Carletons required comprehensive exercises -- in her case, a long paper) on Joyce and Nabokov -- certainly the highest degree of difficulty of any comps attempted that year; and after graduation, when we both ended up in New York, the headline on her first online dating profile was a line from Nabokov talking about Joyce, IIRC. (One guy recognized the source of the line, and they dated for several years.) She worked for a music publisher here and played cello in the Brooklyn Symphony Orchestra. We saw movies at Film Forum and drank beer/wine/shandy and played Scrabble and talked about the books we were reading and the men we were dating and reminisced about those same professors and students we once rolled our eyes at. (She laughed especially long and delightfully when she was a little tipsy.) She went to the University of Michigan to become an archivist, and after a number of months as a cataloger back in Boston, she landed a wonderful job in Washington, D.C. at the Folger Shakespeare Library. When James and I stayed with her in 2010 for the Jon Stewart Rally to Restore Sanity, she gave us a tour of her office. I picked up a copy of the Folger magazine on our way out, and reading through it afterward, I was startled to find a whole article on a new discovery Nadia had made in a 17th-century manuscript -- something she hadnt mentioned to us at all! She often minimized her own accomplishments or abilities, sometimes to her friends frustration, but then, when she was happy with herself or her life, that made her happiness all the more pleasing to us . . . In the last few years, we mostly kept up through phone dates, Facebook, and the occasional visit. The last time I saw her was my wedding last September; I was looking forward very much to her own wedding in a couple weeks. She was a librarian/archives and English-major nerd of the best kind, with a true love for the subjects, all the more so if they were difficult. She could make a sentence drip sarcasm, almost literally, or else say practically everything with her eyebrows, no speech required. She looked lovely with her hair up, and in a hat. Having met her in a narrative class, I find it incomprehensible that her own story concluded so abruptly and unfairly. My sympathies and sorrows go out to all of us at her loss.
Posted on: Mon, 18 Aug 2014 04:53:07 +0000
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