The first time I Googled my own name, it was hard to believe that the primary link directed me to a biography of our daughter, Karen Spector. The irony is that Karen never owned a computer. How the world and I have changed in the 20 years since she died.
To look at my husband Jerry and me, you probably would not know that a heartbreaking tragedy befell our family. We’re just regular people.
In 1987 our daughter Karen lost her life in an ill-fated accident on a fishing boat in Alaska. A Pacific Ocean storm crashed the boat where she was working as a cook and she died of hypothermia.
She had just completed her fourth year as a dietetics major at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and viewed that summer as her last opportunity to seek adventure before returning to school as a fifth year senior.
How could something so terrible happen to her and to us? Today, still, I vacillate between remembering minuscule details of those days and blotting out every painful moment.
One thing I do recall is something I was told during Shloshim, the first 30 days of mourning. The soul of the departed hovers for the 30-day period and will not ascend to heaven until it is sure you are OK.
I felt her presence, heard her voice, “Come on, Mom.” She always said that to urge me to get going. “Come on Mom.” But at the end of 30 days, she was there no longer.
Stage by stage, I plodded through the full-blown stages of grief — denial, anger, bargaining, depression and then acceptance. I was 43 years old and I wanted to die.
I understood, however, that if I could not find a reason to get up in the morning, I would face 40-plus more years of despair. I read that Jewish tradition says we cannot be paralyzed by grief. We must return to active lives and honor our loved ones through the goodness of our work.
Finding a sense of purpose was a slow process and could have taken me in any direction. I returned to school to get my undergraduate degree; Alverno College held my focus and lifted me up for almost four years.
A new major offered at the school, Community Leadership and Development, proved to be the perfect blend of our Jewish mandate to repair the world and my personal commitment to live positively for Karen.
Reading room
Just after her death, my husband Jerry and I established The Karen Spector Scholarship Fund at UW-Madison’s College of Agriculture and Life Science. For the past 19 years, we have been fortunate to attend an honors event at the college, where a senior in Dietetics/Nutritional Sciences is awarded a $1000 scholarship.
Though Karen couldn’t fulfill her dream and finish her studies there, each recipient has gone on to serve the community in a meaningful way.
In 1999, representatives of the UW Foundation and the Nutritional Sciences Department brought us a proposal we found very exciting. They described their need for a special space where students could gather and learn and study. They asked us to underwrite a room in Karen’s name. With full hearts, we agreed.
Today, The Karen Spector Reading and Conference Room is used for study, research, lectures, and meetings in the Nutritional Sciences Building on Lyndon Drive in Madison. A picture of Karen hangs on the wall. A plaque lists the name of each student who has received a scholarship from her fund.
A special section of the reading room is dedicated to resources on cultural foods — particularly vital now as dieticians serve an increasingly multi-cultural world.
Roger A. Sunde, professor and chair of the Nutritional Sciences Department extols the usefulness of the room. “The Spector Room is the heart of our program. From freshmen student orientation through senior projects, it is integral to our teaching.
For us, that room is a palpable expression of our love for our daughter. Filled with the stuff of her life plans, the reading room is our way to keep her memory alive.
But we also feel her presence in other ways. When she was growing up, Karen often found money in strange places. Shortly after she died, Jerry and I started finding coins or bills, here and there.
In Israel, on the top of Masada, six or seven shekels mysteriously fell at our feet, as from the sky. On a very windy day, we found two single dollar bills resting on the grass near our home. When we moved our younger daughter, Cindy, to college, handfuls of pennies were on the ground next to our car when we arrived. Last month I found a dollar bill in a store in New York.
We believe that this is Karen’s way of connecting with us.
June 15, 2007, marks 20 years since we lost our daughter. Not a day goes by that we do not miss her beautiful smile. Karen dreamed of being a dietician with a particular interest in helping women and infants.
She was beautiful yet she didn’t know it. Karen was not perfect but she was ours and we miss her more than words can say.
Two decades later, I believe with full conviction that when someone dear is remembered, they are never really gone. May her memory be for a blessing.
Dianne Spector lives in Milwaukee. Read more about her family’s contribution to the College of Agriculture and Life Science at http://www.nutrisci.wisc.edu/undergrad_ns/ug_stu_info_specbio.html.
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