Post Your Tribute to Kolleen
October 17, 1987 – May 29, 2006
Kolleen lived an active life, illuminating the lives of those she touched and enhancing the communities in which she lived. As a freshman at Albion College, Kolleen was a member of the girls JV basketball team and worked as a volunteer with Albion College Habitat for Humanity, helping to provide affordable housing for less fortunate families in and around Albion, Michigan. Her goal was to eventually become an athletic trainer. Kolleen and her dorm mates spent the entire fall semester learning to knit, and then she took the time to make Christmas gifts for all of her family.
Throughout her brief life, Kolleen strived toward excellence in education, athletics, and community service. At Ottawa Elementary School in Clinton Township, she served on the student council. At Algonquin Middle School, Kolleen excelled in basketball, volleyball, and track, and was voted Eighth Grade Class President.
During her high school years at Chippewa Valley, Kolleen (nicknamed KoRo by teammates) served in the student government during her freshman year and competed in a variety of sports, including basketball (all 4 years), volleyball, soccer, track, and softball, playing a total of 6 years of AAU (Amateur Athletic Union) basketball and 2 years of AAU volleyball. In the midst of a packed schedule she made time to coach an elementary school basketball team. Kolleen was named to the All Academic Team, the 2004 All Macomb County Class A Second Team, the 2004 Detroit Free Press All East Second Team, the 2004 All-East Girls Basketball Team, and the Macomb Coaches Association 2004 ALL-COUNTY Basketball Team, and received an All Metro Honorable Mention in 2004. In 2005, Kolleen’s classmates elected her Most Athletic Girl.
Though Kolleen was a dedicated student, athlete, and community leader, she also had a passion for the finer things of life” her friends, her family, her dog Grant, listening to country music, collecting all kinds of athletic shoes, cooking and inventing her own recipes, exchanging instant messages with her younger brother and sister, cheering on the Detroit Pistons, boating and tubing at her family’s lake house, Quizno’s, and Chicken Marsala and pizza at J. Baldwin’s.
I felt compelled to come here today and say hi! Don’t know why, but here I am. You are sooo missed.
June 1 2010 – Your sister has driver’s training tonight. I remember your first class – you drove home with Grace, Casey and the instructor. June 1 1994 – Final adoption for your brother. The picture of all of us is still on my desk. Missing you always! xoxo
I just wanted to say hi and that I miss you. I got to see your old roommate, Kim, today. I was at Meredith’s triathlon and we ran into each other on her way to register. It was nice to see her this holiday weekend. She told me that she’s leaving for the peace corps on Tuesday. She seems to be really excited about that.
I hope it was you that arranged this random meeting. I like to think it was.
<3
It doesnt take a day like today to think of you… you are always on our mind!!! xxxoooo momspear
Kolleen,
Can’t beleive it’s been four years already. Miss you everyday. Thanks for looking down on us with that big bright smile. Love you always…
Miss you soo much! Its been tough these past 4 years:( I know you are up there looking down at all that love you and miss you… See you in the future.
Hi Angel,
I know you know this already but wanted to post it anyway. Our sweet little girl KYLEIGH KOLLEEN KOCIEMBA arrived on May 4, 2010 at 6:47 pm. She weighed in at 7 lbs 9 oz and was 19 1/4 in tall. She is absolutely beautiful. She looks just like her big brother Greggers. He is just in love with her already. Wish so much that you were here to share in our joy with us. Everyone misses you so very much. Love you so much brat!!
Love,
Di-Bob
You’ve given me a unique idea. Thanks for sharing this info with me.
Hey lover, When I read this, I couldn’t help but think of you. I don’t know if it just hit so close to home, or if it is the closet experience I could relate to… but either way, regardless of how or why it came to me, it brought me back to you. I miss you so much. Sometimes I think that it must have been another life. That it wasn’t me.. but it was me and it was you and everyone you knew. We miss you.
“…..there was a knot in the umbilical cord that was supposed to keep her alive. As she grew and moved, doing tumble turns in my stomach, she put a knot in the cord. And as she prepared to make her way into the world, the knot tightened and cut off the life I was supposed to supply her with.
And she died.
She was a beautiful baby, looked like her sister, with a shock of black hair. We held her, and took photos, building quickly a small stock of memories to hold onto because there were no years ahead to do that slowly.
And eventually, a few hours later, we left her at the hospital and went home.
It was the hardest thing I have ever done. I left my newborn baby all alone, knowing I would never hold her again. I had a piece of cardboard with her footprint on it and a lock of her hair. And the quilted blanket she was wrapped in at the hospital.
Back to the car with the baby capsule inside. Back to a house where the newborn clothes I’d washed a couple of days before hung on a drying rack.
Hanging there was a new outfit I’d bought for her. She was buried in it, along with a singlet I wanted her to wear because she was so small and I didn’t want her to be cold. I was her mother and that’s what mothers worry about.
From the day we came home and for months later time in our house stood still. I watched the world outside moving at a normal pace, but I was not part of it.
For while I blamed myself. I should have kept her alive. That was my job. There was something I should have, could have done. But it was just an accident, a terrible, awful accident.
Things were very black, but life has a way of picking you up and moving you forward. At Madeline’s funeral, my eldest daughter – then two-and-a-half – wandered round the small circle of family pulling faces at us to try to cheer us up.
Cards and letters and flowers flooded into our house, from work colleagues, friends and politicians. Not one of them had a hackneyed message. Each was original and heartfelt. Each person struggled to find the words because there are no easy words to cover the pain and loss. I treasure each of them today.
At the time I couldn’t talk to people. My husband and mother dealt with the phone calls. But just knowing that people were thinking about us helped more than I can say. Along with my daughter, husband and family, the people who took the time to let us know they were with us helped tether me to life at a time when I often felt the pain was unbearable.
Helpful too was the advice a midwife gave when she came to check on me a couple of days after I left hospital. She told me that “whatever you feel is OK.”
Everyone grieves in their own way. I expected the tears and the pain, although the strength of it and the deep place where it came from surprised me. I didn’t expect the days when I felt kind of OK, when there were some moments where I didn’t cry. It was good to know that feeling all right was OK too.
And eventually there comes a day when there are more smiles than tears, and when it’s time for your world to start moving in sync with everyone else’s. And that’s OK too.
People have told me I was brave to carry on, but that’s not true. Once you’ve made the decision to go on breathing in and breathing out, life just happens to you. Groceries need to be bought, dinner needs to be cooked, my eldest needed her parents. And after a while it’s normal again.
I am permanently changed by Madeline’s death. My emotions run much closer to the surface and I cry much more easily than I ever did before. There are news stories I cannot listen to, television programs I cannot watch because they are about children lost or dying. Every disaster sends my thoughts immediately to the mothers who’ve lost children and for a moment I’m paralysed with the pain they must be feeling.
I know now I am stronger than I ever thought I could be, partly because the worst thing I could imagine happening to me has happened and I’m still here.
I understand when people say, after a tragedy, that they didn’t think it could happen to them. I struggle to believe I’m the person who lost a daughter. That wasn’t who I thought I’d be, and yet that’s who I am.
I think about Madeline every day. I talk about her when I’m asked. We celebrate her birthdays with a cake and a present we give to a charity to pass on to a girl of the same age. We leave balloons by her graveside on her birthday and a tree at Christmas. She’d still be a little girl and would be unimpressed by flowers. They are for another day.
We build memories in a different way. I keep track of what year she would have been in at school, but I deliberately don’t think about what she would have been like if she’d lived. For me, imagining her alive would only illustrate what I’ve lost and I worry if I did that, I’d start crying and might never stop.
Talk about closure annoys me immensely. People should, if they want, seek answers about why someone they loved has died and if there’s someone to blame. But even after the answers have come and the blame, if there is blame, been placed, the memory of the person who’s been lost doesn’t go. The pain of losing them and the joy they brought remain. They are one of the threads in your life that continue on. Nothing ends or closes.
Should someone you know go through the same thing I did, be there for them. For a while they may not want to talk to you, or see you. But let them know you’re there. And when they’re ready, let them talk about what happened. It’s sad, painfully sad, but talking is a way of helping keep the memory of their baby alive.
The memory of Madeline is always with me.
So, when I’m asked how many children I have, after I’ve looked to see if you’re pregnant and paused to think about whether I want to have the conversation, more often than not I’ll answer.
I have four children. Two girls who are 11 and seven, a boy who is five, and my second daughter, Madeline who would have been nine.
This is what I wrote two days after Madeline died, and what I read out at her funeral:
These are the things I had hoped for Madeline:
I thought for a long time she was going to be a boy, but deep down I had hoped she’d be a girl we could call Madeline.
I hoped I’d looked after her well while she was growing inside me and that all the things I hadn’t done quite right wouldn’t have affected her and made her underweight or caused a problem – and she was perfect; our beautiful little girl.
Apart from that I had simple hopes for her.
I hoped she’d fall asleep on my shoulder when I was cuddling her.
I hoped she and her daddy would fall asleep together on the couch and that I could sneak in with a camera and take a photo of them.
I hoped she and Jessie would love each other and be close and that they’d enjoy playing together… and she’d have fun when Jessie showed her all her toys and all the things she can do.
I hoped she’d sleep well and eat well… and that she and I and Jessie would do a lot of things in my year off – that we go for walks, and go to lunch a lot, and do all the things I meant to do while Jessie was a baby but never got around to.
The things I hope for Madeline now:
I hope she knows how much we love her and how much we will always love her.
I hope wherever she is that she doesn’t think she caused us pain because we’re not sad because she came into our life, only because she was in it for such a short time – because we couldn’t bring our beautiful girl home and because we had to say goodbye before we’d had a chance to say hello.
I hope she’s with her grandparents who also can’t be with us now – I hope she’s giving them cuddles and falling asleep in their arms and that she’s giving them some of the joy Jessie gives her Nana.
At the moment I’m in the middle of a big black void… but there are three bright lights in that void.
One is Madeline – a reminder always of what could have been and so very nearly was… our other favourite girl who will be an important part of our family forever.
The other two are Phil and Jessie – showing me there is a life to get on with, and a future for us all.
And each time we get a hug from someone, each time someone phones or sends flowers or a card, each time someone tells us they love us, or we can laugh at something or Jessie smiles or sings or just is, there’s another light in the darkness…
And in time it won’t be so black anymore because we have a lot of love around us and a lot of good reasons to go on… while there will always be patches of darkness, it will mostly be lit by happiness and love.
Madeline will always be our beautiful girl… while she trod only lightly on this earth, she will always be deep in our hearts.”
Hey Kolleen,
A couple days ago I had a home care patient and she had graduated from Albion in the early ’50s and now her grandson goes there. Then last night I’m on FB and in a round-about way come across the name of the girl who received your basketball award at Albion .
And this morning, Ian comes downstairs for breakfast and has an Albion hoodie on !
Thanks for the visits … Love you