Cardinal n30491 requesting clearance for takeoff: Elegy for Dr. Karen B. Hunter, photographer, preacher, psychologist, pilot, great friend

On Sept. 2, 2005, my close friend Karen B. Hunter's plane stalled, then crashed. She landed the plane well enough to save the passenger, but she could not stop the plane fast enough, so she turned it, hoping perhaps to turn fully away from the building ahead. The angle with which it went into the wall meant that she--her body--took the brunt of the crash.

It is not my purpose here to try to understand why it happened--the final NTSB report is not out yet, and even when it is, I will never fully trust it. No one who knew Karen would ever fully trust a government report. It doesn't help me anyway to review what remained. My purpose is to praise, not to bury. I can blame myself for not yelling at her more when we ran out of gas in the car, I can be angry that she seemed to have "just enough" gas to make the flight. I'll never know whether something gummed up the gas tank, someone siphoned water out because it was a gas crisis or she miscalculated by a half ounce of gas. I will never know either why no emergency rescue team was sent out when she said she wasn't going to make the highway. They waited for sight of the crash to get an ambulance. In my mind, she and the passenger could've bailed before the plane crashed. Something in me makes me think she was treated just as panicking woman not to be taken seriously. Either way, it was a tragic death because it arose out of part hubris -- a person thinking they have covered every base when they may have not -- both in the plane and at Teterboro. Her passenger says she was calm throughout. She had no idea, I think, that there would be no real assistance once she'd called in distress. It would also be incomprehensible to die in a plane that was supposed to glide for miles without gas. Had the post office not been there, she'd've knocked down a telephone poll or two and landed on grass. Even if she forgot that a newly refurbished engine eats gas faster than normal and she was short a half gallon, there should have been breathing room. There's no breathing room when you have buildings near the runway. Anyway, I digress. Karen loved to fly, felt confident in the air of the "wild blue yonder." It seemed like it would be for someone who loved to sing to get the chance to perform. To live in the dream, the rush of emotion and the glory of the sky.

Since I met Karen, a little more than a year ago, I have come to ask myself the question over and over: what made this woman fly? There was no one answer. She told me once that she loved to be "in the wind". We went to see Werner Herzog's documentary, "The White Diamond" in which the scientist who devised the beautiful airship for which the film is named described dreams in which he found himself floating above his house. She said she had the same dream. She remembered being three (I think) and realizing that she could fly (i.e. jump) from her bed to her brother's. When she played on the swings as 'a child, she lifted herself as high as possible inspiring great worry in her neighbors, but not her parents. She drove her car and rode her bicycle as if both were extensions of her muscles. This also meant that when someone made a foolish mistake or cut in front of her path, she was infuriated. The ire would almost instantly diffuse, like a balloon, when she saw something beautiful or if she realized that it was upsetting me. The problem with forgiveness is that sometimes a person needs to be forgiven to forgive. With me, Karen sought to correct many mistakes she regretted all her life -- she was very much the mother I did not have and I forgave her mistakes she made in her life because of the extraordinary effort she made to "become whole." She came out at 38, went back to school to become a successful psychologist, a pilot and Noam Chomsky intellectual of the sort that most of my Ivy league leftists friends had become. But, she knew she wasn't fully there. She didn't love herself a lot and wanted to go into therapy to build the self-esteem to see a clear way to making amends with those she most cared about. If she could now, she would tell those whom she had not yet had time to heal with how sorry she was to have left them without doing so. In her way, however god and nature allow, I know she will not left that unsaid.

I should know a great deal about Karen's temper because I deserved it more than anyone and I rarely saw it. I thoroughly deserved it but, as a psychologist and a fellow unfinished person, she took a great deal of mercy on me. However easy this might have been as compared with repairing longerstanding relationships, we needed each other to take care of each other and to grow. Maybe I'd've figured a way to my own mother over time with her help and she to her family with mine. Meanwhile, I was incorrigible. I refused to do the simplest things. I can be very doctrinaire about my right to be slovenly, which was more than selfish. It was an affront to her very good sense of fashion and to the deep love she kept trying to show me. This was especially selfish as, had I taken better care of myself, she might have introduced me to her family with confidence and I might have been able to help her mediate through things on the spot. I know what it's like to be angry to your bones at a parent, yet I also saw Karen as a parent different from mine and worth the outreach. But, I could've also explained some of the awkwardnesses. But, I was too much of a mess for anyone but someone with keen sensitivities and a great ability to handle eccentricity to take seriously. You never know how far away you are from what you want to be until you are with someone whom you want to be with. I didn't trust myself to be able to change much and I knew she could see through a lot to the core of me and I took advantage of this gift. No one has ever said sweeter things to me or been so gentle with me.Of course, one of the best moments of my life came as a result of her getting angry at me. She told me I was "an idea and not a person." What she meant (and also said) was that I had made it impossible for me to do anything I wanted to do. For instance, I had a schedule which did not create room for more than my few college friends and my cats. Which is not what I or my cats wanted.

Karen, ironically, felt an insatiable need to heal. A staunch and lifelong feminist, she was pained by the stories of unfulfilled mothers. She cried because my mother could both knit and speak fluent French, yet found herself unable to succeed--my mother's paranoid schizophrenia aside. She kept asking me if she could pay for someone to clear out my mother's apartment for her and to help her. I refused and refused her, both because it was not her responsibility and because I had seen my mother create and recreate the chaos necessary to the shape of her world. Probably, she would have done it anyway. When we first met, she went on and on about her mother's talents. Karen, however, didn't consider herself an artist, though she took extraordinary photographs and she wrote beautifully. She even had a very sweet singing voice. But she agonized much more about how the patriarchy and enforced heterosexuality had destroyed the women around her.

Talking to Karen about pain and suffering was like talking to a preacher, in the best sense. She once said that she developed her belief in the power of transformation while at Union Theological Seminary. No, she was not some sort of airy or macrobiotically religious person. Hers was a passionate, downright fleshy sense of the spiritual. She accused me of gnosticism when I professed a lack of interest in physical contact (I was such a liar). Karen would look directly at you with her huge blue eyes, her blonde hair mid-tussle and her body flying out it's seat and tell you, "that's why you're not going to succeed, because you don't have faith. God gave you gifts and life gives you so few pleasures and you refuse them both." So, here I am, very unusually alone at midnight. By now, we'd've talked for hours about our respective days. I'd hear about her epiphanies with her patients. And we would both talk about how drained we were. How much we both wanted to get away, though my version of this just meant to the movies.

When she met me, I was looking for the "light fantastic" which the father of the tenuous family in "The Glass Menagerie" took out of town, but like his son, I was only ready to go--to take on the challenge of what I truly wanted--while seated in the dark with a box of Junior Mints. This is not to say that I was, or that she was encouraging me, to abandon the very responsible life I have so cleverly constructed, complete with all the appropriate magazine subscriptions. She just wanted me and everyone she loved to be passionate in action as welll as words. Truly passionate, to the point of flying to get to someplace you know you must be in order to experience something that must be revealed--like the music of the street bands in Cuba, or the stories of the people she photographed on it's haggard, postwar Parisienne streets. And then of course, to come home and talk about it endlessly for hours over a very silly drink, or a tapioca tea and to just be in the wind, sharing the day with a close friend.There is much more for me to say, and I am sure I will be more eloquent as time passes. If not, then time will owe me and it already does.