the color of memory is blue

Melanie Thernstrom wrote The Dead Girl when she was still in college. It's a long book (430 pages) and not as polished as her later work, such as the devastating Halfway Heaven. But The Dead Girl has its own power. It captures what it was like to be young in a specific moment of time -- the early 80's -- and how Thernstrom grappled with first the disappearance and then the violent death of Roberta Lee, a troubled and gifted young woman and Thernstrom's best friend.

Deep inside the book there is a moment that has stayed with me for years. Thernstrom is sitting in a courtroom at the murder trial of Lee's boyfriend. The prosecutor plays the video footage taken at the discovery of Lee's body, and Thernstrom can't stop herself from watching:

you strain in your seat, trying to tell them one from the other -- limb from branch, dark shape from dark shape and blue mist. Five weeks' sleep and look how wedded already she is to the earth: think how she look now that years and years have passed, the transfiguring blueness, distance changing hue. Blue is such a lonely color. The loneliness as morning or dusk or distance or light is lonely: the loneliness that the image is so far away and was taken so long ago, and the loneliness that it doesn't really exist anymore -- it is an image on a blue screen, which will be turned off and blank before you have finished thinking about it.

I think about this passage often. The idea of transfiguring blueness, how people recede from us when they die no matter how hard we try to keep them with us. They are changed from living breathing people into characters. "The story is finished," Thernstrom says, "and you are the one to tell it. Roberta is dead and you are the one who remembers." There is no remedy for loss, of course. But stories give voice to our sorrow and our longing. They keep us from being engulfed by grief, and in their telling they bring us back into the world of the living.