Learning of Darcee's Death

Summer 1997

I walk out of the door of the Regimental Command Center at Camp Buckner. I told staff that I wasn’t feeling well. It wasn’t an excuse that carried much weight around West Point, but I was training to take over for the second detail which wouldn’t start for more than a week. I was redundant this week and today I wasn’t in the mood to be redundant.

I’d woken up the night before in a rage, grabbing my knife before I realized where I was. The adrenalin cranked through my blood as I tried to talk myself down. That wasn’t like me and it wasn’t like me to wake up despondent, drained of all energy with a pit in my stomach deep enough that a someone digging at the bottom would strike his shovel’s blade against the roof of hell.

It didn’t make sense. I was dating a beauty queen that I was wild for and I was about to take over my first major organizational role at West Point. Yesterday I had a bounce in my step and a nervous energy about tackling a job that I wasn’t sure I could handle, today I couldn’t feel my legs as they carried my burdened body away from work and into the woods.

I had a book of Hemingway’s short stories in the cargo pocket of my BDU’s. I would get away and read it in hopes that that Papa’s words would pull me away from the invisible ledge. I trod the trail around Lake Popolopen to a rocky outcropping where I’d fished from during some of the down hours during my summer training the year before. I lay down upon the flat gray rock and began to read.

Three pages beyond my bookmark, Hemingway’s character described a girl that he’d been friends with as a child. A wave of grief ran over me. I set the book upon the granite. I couldn’t move. Despair seized my limbs. I lay motionless for ten or fifteen minutes before fighting my way back into the reality of the warm New York summer’s day.

I walked back to Camp Buckner. The grief hit me two more times along the way, dropping me to a knee. I didn’t know what was happening.

I avoided the Command Center and continued on towards the guard station. I knew that I couldn’t work, but thought that I might be able to catch a ride with the duty driver back to the campus to retrieve some of the gear that I would need the summer. A simple productive task¸ something basic to get me moving.

The cadet on duty looked down at my name tag. He bit his lip, then said, “Matt Kuntz, you’re father has been calling for you. I’m sorry, but a close friend of yours has died.”

I felt the blood run out of my face. My dad hadn’t said who it was. I can’t remember what I said before leaving the guard shack and making my way towards the pay phones.

My stepmother answered the phone and told me it was Darcee. The tears rolled down my face. I hung up the phone as sobs shook my chest.

Darcee and I had been friends since grade school. We swam together on the Lion’s Swim Team as children and through high school. I’d done my best to help her with the anorexia that attacked her midway through her freshman year. I’d written letters to her every day that she was at the treatment center in Arizona and did my best to help her make the transition towards wellness when she returned home.

Darcee lived another handful of summers after her stay at the treatment center. She fell in love with the man of her dreams. Two weeks earlier I’d cooked her breakfast as she talked about moving to Missoula to be with him, hoping to eventually get married and start a family. I’d never seen her happier.

I didn’t know that the anorexia had transitioned into bulimia which was poised to overwhelm her gentle heart. My grief continued through her funeral in Montana and in the years that followed. Darcee was an unbelievable friend. I will always miss her and struggle with questions of why the Lord called her home so soon.

Beyond the loss, I realized for the first time in my life that I’d been shown proof that the universe was more complex that the reality I could perceive with my natural senses. I’d woken up in a rage at the exact time of her death over two thousand miles away from where she’d passed. The grief crippled me before I’d heard that she was gone.

It was my first sign and it was horrible. My only solace in feeling something both bigger than all of us and completely all of us was that I knew she wasn’t really gone. Darcee was gone for today, gone for tomorrow, but whatever I’d experienced had convinced me that the ones who loved her would see her again.

Side Note: On the plane back to Montana for Darcee’s funeral, I swore not to ever fight against mental illness again. It was too complex and horrible. Looking back at my naivety, I can’t help but think of the phrase, “If you want to hear God laugh, tell Him your plans.”