Wayland Resident's Life One of Passion, Caring and Humor

Marina Evelyn Keegan loved artichokes and traveling and theater and the yellow pea coat that became a trademark look on the campus of Yale University.

“Marina just was like a ball of fire,” said Tracy Keegan, Marina’s mother. “She was my comet, burning her way through life and catching everything she possibly could. She was just doing everything all at once and doing it really well.”

Marina Keegan, a lifetime Wayland resident, died tragically in a May 26 car accident in Dennis, Mass. She was 22. According to her mother, Marina was on the way to the Cape to meet with her collaborators on one of her many writing projects – this one a musical titled, “Independents” that has been tapped to play at the New York International Fringe Festival that will take place Aug. 10-26.

“Independents” is about a group of 20-somethings who masquerade as Revolutionary War re-enactors as a cover for drug smuggling. A change in their situation, forces the group to rethink their efforts and consider actually performing Revolutionary War re-enactments.

“’Independents’ is ultimately a story of friends stuck in transition: not sure when they'll grow up or if they already have, falling in and out of love, and facing questions about the future they don't want to answer,” according to the musical’s Kickstarter website.  

The lyricist for “Independents,” Mark Sonnenblick said he recognizes that carrying Keegan’s legacy forward now rests on getting her work out into the public.

“I think the thing that she would have wanted is just getting her work out there where people can come see the show this summer and be able to hear her voice,” Sonnenblick said. “In addition to being an incredible person and writer, she was also incredibly ambitious. She was very excited to have graduated and be out in the world and starting to do this for real.”

Gifted

Keegan graduated magna cum laude from Yale University just a week before the car crash. Her mother said Marina found “her tribe” at Yale – it was a place where people who thought like her and worked like her could become intimate collaborators.

“Yale was the perfect fit for her,” Tracy Keegan said. She said her daughter was drawn to Yale’s theater community and programs and was overjoyed to have been accepted to the Ivy League university. 

Even in the midst of some of the brightest classmates in the world, Marina was able to find her niche and light her own path. That path carried her to becoming a much-loved columnist at the Yale Daily News, an intern at The New Yorker, a high-school staff member of Barack Obama’s presidential campaign and the personal assistant – and “unofficial granddaughter” – of famed scholar and literary critic Harold Bloom.

“She had an amazing intellect and curiosity and internal drive,” Tracy Keegan said. “She so loved learning. She was someone who truly reveled in intellectual exploration.

“She would study life, and I think that’s what made her a beautiful writer.”

Sonnenblick, her friend and collaborator, said that she had a passion for exploring the issues of social responsibility and how a person’s decision to follow a particular life trajectory – traditional or non-traditional – impacts the world around them.

“She wrote about things that she thought about and that her friends thought about,” Sonnenblick said. He met Keegan during their junior year when they developed a mutual respect for one another’s writing in a fiction class at Yale. “She had a remarkable ability … one of the most tragic things is that this was a voice she was developing and a skill that she was honing. She had an ability to make people feel like she was speaking to them in particular.”

Sonnenblick said that what he misses most about Marina is, for now, changing day to day or even hour to hour.

“Right now, what I’m going to miss is what everybody is going to miss,” he said. “It’s what she would have been writing had she been able to keep writing.”

An “Old Soul”

As Marina’s parents, Kevin and Tracy Keegan, plan their daughter’s celebration of life service, they said they are learning things about their daughter that they hadn’t known before.

Tracy Keegan said she read a comment from someone online that thanked Marina for standing up to a bully in grade school. While that specific story was news to her mother, Tracy Keegan said she wasn’t surprised by it.

She said her daughter had always been a deeply caring person, an “absolutely wonderful sister” to her brothers, and “an old soul.” While she can’t be sure, Tracy Keegan said she thinks medical issues Marina had as a child helped her mature into that “old soul” at a young age.

When Marina was just months old, she underwent extreme surgery for a severe medical issue. Tracy Keegan said that she remembers telling her infant daughter then, “I will get to know you. I will learn who you are. We will get through this.”

They did get through it, and Tracy Keegan did get to know her daughter. She learned that Marina was a night owl whose most inspired moments could only happen late in the night. She learned that she had an “amazing sense of humor.” She learned Marina would find a cause and devote herself to it fully, with fervor and passion.

Kevin Keegan said he would often tell Marina that he wished she would spend more time at home in Wayland with him and the family. But a friend of Marina’s helped him rethink that request.

“Marina loved so many and was loved by so many others that she needed to be with them,” Kevin Keegan said the friend told him. “I needed to share her.”

He said he hopes his daughter is remembered as someone who wanted people to be thoughtful about the decisions they make. It was a passion she outlined publically in her piece “Even Artichokes Have Doubts.”

While the article looked specifically at the percentage of Yale graduates who go into jobs in the consulting or financial industries, Kevin Keegan said his daughter’s main goal with the article was not to question the validity of those industries, but rather to encourage her classmates to think deeply about that choice.

“It had nothing to do with a negative view about financial services, but more about the choices and the actual initial ideals and goals and aspirations that her fellow students had when going to Yale,” Kevin Keegan said of the article. “She wanted everyone to take a hard look at the decisions they were making before they gave up those ideals they first had.”

Marina made the decision to be a writer and it was a decision she embraced wholeheartedly. Tracy Keegan said her daughter was excited about an impending move to New York where she had accepted a job at The New Yorker.

“She just had so much life. Just had so much she wanted to explore,” Tracy Keegan said. “I always felt like she was teaching me more than I was teaching her.”

A Celebration of Marina Keegan’s Life will be held at 2 p.m. on Saturday, June 2, at First Parish in Wayland.

Kevin and Tracy Keegan have established a fund to benefit young writers, like their daughter, at Yale College. Checks can be made payable to Yale University, Marina Keegan Memorial Fund c/o Yale University, Box 2038, New Haven CT 06521-2038.

Gifts can also be made online at www.yale.edu/give. Under “Special Instructions,” donors can choose “In Memory,” and follow the instructions.