by Susan Tweit
The call came on one of those afternoons when life moves so quickly that even though you’re going as fast as you possibly can, you feel like the Red Queen in Through the Looking Glass, as if you’re barely keeping up.
“Susan, it’s Jim,” my friend said, and then paused. “I’ve got sad news: Carol Jacobson died yesterday in a rafting accident on the Green River.”
“No,” I said.
We were silent, me attempting to make sense of nonsensical news; he probably wondering what he should say.
“But she was so excited about that trip,” I said, as if that could change what had already happened. “She had always wanted to run Lodore Canyon.”
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“What happened?”
“The raft flipped in Triplet Falls and she fell out. They picked her up in the pool at the bottom, but she never recovered consciousness.”
Silence again while we both tried to digest the news.
Then we talked for a bit, remembering the previous fall when we had signed books at her store, and how she had loved books and ideas and stories–and being home in northwestern Colorado after thirty years away.
“I’m sorry,” he said again.
“Me, too.”
That was a month ago, and I’m still trying to make sense of the news that Carol Valera Jacobson, age 54, co-owner of Downtown Books in Craig, Colorado, poet, teacher, memoirist, storyteller, gardener, mom to three grown sons, re-married barely two years, is dead.
We had just “talked” in email a few days before, as she was getting ready for the raft trip. She asked for advice on dealing with slugs and grasshoppers in her garden; she nudged me about arranging my trip to sign books at her store and talk to her memoir-writing classes; she wanted information on writing workshops I’ll be teaching.
And then she fell out of a raft going over a series of drops in Lodore Canyon and she’s gone. Just like that.
Carol lit up a room. She loved life–people say that, but Carol really did, and was engaged in every moment of it, from gardening to giving the best hugs and laughing whole-body laughs, to improving downtown Craig, the ranching and oil town where she had grown up and to which she had returned six years ago to be closer to family.
More than 400 people came to her memorial service, and the tears and laughter and remembrances went on for two hours.
I keep thinking of things I need to tell her. And then I remember she’s gone.
I want to honor Carol’s life, and her passion for stories and literacy and for the community of land and people there in Moffat County.
I want to carry forward her laugh and her stubborn genius for making good things happen; I want to be the writer she believed I am.
And I want to make sense of the door that closed with her sudden death, and watch for the one I’m sure she’s holding open somewhere else.
Copyright 2009 Susan J. Tweit. Originally published in the Salida Mountain Mail.
Award-winning writer and commentator Susan J. Tweit lives and gardens in Salida when she’s not on the road promoting her new memoir, Walking Nature Home, which inspired one reviewer to write, “You simply must read this book.”