AbsurdBeats

She was a funny roommate.

Don’t be fooled: she was a Badger, through and through.

Yes, she had a sense of humor—four women crammed into an apartment originally meant for two, you had to be able to laugh—but more than that, she was one of those people who couldn’t hold a frown.

Chris would come home from classes or a stint working food service at Chadbourne and relay something terrible, glare a bit, then immediately burst into laughter.

She was always cracking herself up. Hell, one day someone crashed into her (parked) car and left the scene; Chris ran up the steps into our apartment, yelled Someone hit my car! And then started laughing.

About that car: she let us drive it, as well as her Honda Spree. We drove the shit out of that Spree.

This was not an unusual occurrence in our apartment.

B. had known Chris since the two of them were little. Their families went camping together, and while they weren’t (I think. . .) roommates in Chadbourne, they did both live in the hall, maybe even on the same floor.

In any case, while I knew her before Madison, we became friends there, and, of course, roommates. B. and I were bridesmaids in her wedding, and I gave a reference for her when she became a cop in Connecticut.

About Connecticut: She moved there with her then-boyfriend, now husband widower, John. John lived on the first floor of our apartment building on Breese Terrace and, unlike a previous boyfriend (who had also lived on the first floor of our apartment building on Breese Terrace), was a good guy. He got into the chemical engineering PhD program at UConn, so Chris moved out there with him and became a cop in the meantime.

They married, moved to Minneapolis for John’s job at 3M, and had three kids. Chris and I didn’t really keep in touch after her wedding, but B. kept me updated on her life.

Chris, me, and B. after our Polar Bear swim in Lake Michigan, January 1987.

It fell to B. to inform me of Chris’s death.

She’d apparently had difficulty walking on September 14, went into the hospital, and died this past Sunday. Chris, who was always close to her family, was surrounded by them in the last moments of her good, if too short, life.

May she rest in peace.