A Garland for Heather

She was just getting started with a promising life, but a stoned driver didn’t bother to care.

San Francisco coffee house somewhere on Courtland Street near Bernal Heights. The hum of activity around me: steam gurgling through low-fat milk, people wearing faded denim, in line and out, easy going but rushing, a rustling Chronicle in the hands of a middle-aged man sitting next to me. Now black ink covers his fingertips. On this day my niece soils his fingers.

I imagine: Take Heather’s obituary on page C-11 times a few million Sunday morning fingers — all probing for connection with the ambiguous, often indifferent world. Many are touching Heather, knowing something of her, but only a few grasp the three hundred words that summarize her brief life. It comes down to three hundred words, plus or minus a few, to render this enigmatic young woman into a neat, comprehensible package, her quest for celebrity now carbon smudging fingers, turning pages, a few stopping long enough to notice the salient facts: 28 years old, loved animals, must have been a beauty, dressed smartly. Maybe a common conclusion creeps around The City: young, much too young — tragic.

Heard about that awful mid-day car accident on Highway 4 near Martinez. She was the passenger and only fatality, wasn’t she? Could there have been alcohol involved? Drugs? More carnage littering highways, jamming traffic. When are we going to slow down?

But for the cheap printer’s ink smudging fingers, this is a pristine day — a bright, dry, spring-in-bloom Sunday, a day full of possibilities, of choices. For most denizens of this coffee house, there is nothing close to closure; they/we have so many options, whether a slow stroll through Golden Gate Park or to sip coffee in a dark nook, warmed by a single bulb and a good book.

Her body touches darkness now — her spirit? Who is clear? But her body is cold, still, shrouded in the blackness she chose to honor during that Goth phase, but there is now no movement from it — can’t be — no more compression of determination left to transform hope. No way for her to move to another temporary, shadowy place, to change this day, this week, with the flowing mélange of a searching life.

Her impact was much more than three hundred words. She could reach into your psyche, own it, possess it, then abruptly release it. Whoever stood up to the challenge must eventually withdraw, changed, chastened — contemplative. Heather was never just here: she was HERE. In your face. Pulling down your defenses and, as if a piercing arrow, finding your heart, making you crave for a way to tether diffident love; making you pray for a breakthrough in her journey to unite body, mind, and spirit; making you want to hand her fulfillment, while helping her shift uncommon allure into achievement. She always could have had it all, yet for reasons mostly unclear, she chose to possess little — save the yearnings of so many hearts and a few orphaned pets.

But I cannot push away her power to retreat: It was the wellspring of so much trepidation among those who loved her. Her armor often dulled the precision of her exuberant love. It was the pain of people, unreliable at best, insensitive at worst, that undercut this vulnerable soul. Her sensitivity, her yearning for predictable people, conversely pushed her into escape velocity. Love and fear of us hung her life in suspended animation. She could give us access, but not too much, access, but not enough. That was Heather.

And quite possibly, the dialectic between loving/needing people and fearing/shunning them brought her to animals. They, more than we could count on Heather. Lesser creatures could return what we cannot: unconditional love, dependent appreciation, no aspirations for her but to let her be, to let her feed and caress and manage. Furry people gave us the clearest view of her, who among them was unfettered by suspicion, longing, or unanswered expectations.

So the newspaper carrying the framework of Heather’s life will become waste tomorrow, to be tossed into landfills, or recycled, or gather dust in garages and attics. Smudged fingers will be washed. Our family will cleanse itself, thinking mostly about the sublime moments that were her best and brightest hours. We, too, will discard the boxed words trying to contain her life — save a few clippings — but we, unlike the reading man next to me and all the strangers out there, will wonder what could have become of her. Such fleeting chances she had, our Heather. She was much, much more than so many fingertips darkened with the ink of her once-upon-a-time passage among us.

Footnote: On March 6, 1997, Heather Grace Luttjohann was killed in a multi-car accident on Highway 4 near Martinez, California, an infamous, crowded, high-speed deathtrap.