Memoir: Kala's Tree, part 1

Memoir:  Kala's Tree, a ongoing memoir of our niece Kala Hardy, can be found in its entirety by following the Kala Hardy cloudtag at right.



This tree is for Kala.  Kala is our niece.  Kala's mother and father have some pretty serious and chronic problems, so much so that they were unable to care for their own children for long stretches of time.  In 1995, my sister-in-law Mary Pat flew to Anchorage and brought two of their young daughters down to California - Kala, age 2-1/2, and her younger sister Brenna, maybe 10 months old. 

They stayed at their Grandma Pat and Grandpa Bob's house, being cared for mostly by Grandma Pat and their Aunt Mary Pat.  I came for a visit with our new baby Nora, who was only six months old herself.  I could see how hard it was for Pat, who was also working and teaching high school, to try to care for both girls, especially Kala.  My husband and I offered to help by bringing Kala back with us to Chicago, until their parents could pull themselves together sufficiently to care for their own children again.

So we became Kala's foster parents.  It was a challenging time.  No one wanted to break the sisters up, given what they had already been through, and yet we all wanted to give the girls the care and attention they needed.  Grandma and Mary Pat could then focus on Brenna, and Sean and I could help Kala adjust to living in a normal household.

Of course we knew nothing about parenting a toddler, since our first child was still a young baby.  And the way in which Kala had been parented made it even more of a challenge.  Looking back, it is amazing to me that we took it on.  But it seemed like a moral imperative at the time, and I think I would have made the same decision today.

Kala grew out of toddlerhood and into an arrestingly beautiful girl, with huge dark eyes and a heart-shaped face.  She faced many stresses in her life, as did her two sisters.  There is much to write about her that will have to come later, but what matters today is this:  Kala is dead.  She died at the age of fifteen, at a party.  She took too much of something and never woke up.  Kala would have been nineteen on December 7 of this year.

I can fill the black hole in my heart with stories about the headstrong, crazy girl who did and said wild, infurating, funny things, the tiny dervish who called me Mommy.  I can plant a linden tree and make a terracotta plaque to put under it for all passersby to read and wonder about.  I was glad when the city delivered a linden as Kala's tree, because Marcel Proust's famous flood of childhood memories took place upon tasting a madeleine cookie dunked in linden-flower tea.  I can look at her tree and have my own Proustian moment, or just enjoy it for the serene, pretty sight it is.

When somebody dies, the stone gets taken out less and less often from its velvet-lined box, examined, and heaved back on the shelf of memory. Doing this too frequently would swamp the boat.  But it's important to remember what's in those boxes, even if only to make me grateful that I knew and loved that person.  Somehow Kala's stone feels heavier than everybody else's, even my father's.  I don't know if it will ever feel lighter.

The linden is bare now, all the leaves having blown off in last week's rainy gusts.  I might decorate Kala's tree in some way that she would have liked.  I'm thinking she might go for some purple Halloween lights wrapped around the bare branches.