said well by karin bergquist from "over the rhine": "We are so saddened to learn that Katie has passed away. So young, beautiful and talented. Such a loss for those of us left behind. Our thoughts and prayers are with Katie's family and friends. We cry with you."
peace katie, sleep well.
A Charmed Life’s Cruel End Brings a Test of Faith for Survivors
Katie Reider in 2006. This month she died of a rare tumor at age 30, leaving behind her partner and two young children.
They were three kids from Cincinnati who met in a Christian theater group in the summer of 1995 and spent a lot of time talking about God.
There was Dan Stroeh, tall, athletic, smart, eloquent, the son of a Lutheran minister. There was Karen Boone, a gymnast since age 5 who found God as a junior in high school and seemed wise beyond her years. And there was Katie Reider, beautiful, talented, funny, fearless, sort of the female version of Phineas, the effortlessly perfect alpha male in John Knowles’s “A Separate Peace.” In a group of talented heartland kids, she was the one who lit up the room, surely the most blessed of them all.
And through the years, as college friends, as Karen and Katie became lovers and partners, after Dan presided over the backyard wedding where they ran barefoot together into the future, after the couple moved to Montclair and he to Manhattan, they remained friends and soul mates.
But still, in some ways, they ended up just where they started, three kids from Cincinnati who spent a lot of time talking about God.
There’s really no way to make sense of the horror that befell Katie Reider, a singer/songwriter, with a huge following back home and a growing national fan base, who seemed on the cusp of much larger success when her life was destroyed by a rare tumor that ate into her jaw and face, stole her voice, left her blind in one eye and finally killed her this month at the age of 30.
And surely all of their Bible reading and earnest late-night discussions of God’s plan could not have prepared them for the Job-like tale in which they became players. Still. It sounds like something from the heart, not some rote recitation of received wisdom when Dan and Karen say surely there was some plan, some meaning, even some good in Katie’s nightmare.
“She’d often wonder why God was doing this to her, why God made her suffer so much,” said Karen, who took the last name Reider in 2005 when she became pregnant for the first time. The couple had two children, now ages 2 and 4, using a donor. “Sometimes she’d cry out in pain: ‘God, give me mercy.’ But she never doubted there was a purpose. She never lost her faith. And I have to believe this can be life-changing in a positive way because Katie would have expected nothing less.”
You can pick out the lessons you want from their story. About faith — as balm or as placebo. About love’s unexpected paths, and in this case, in a conservative environment not always accepting of a gay relationship. About medical care: Karen’s employer began including employees’ partners in their health coverage plan in January 2007, and the plan covered what could have been deemed a pre-existing condition. That spared them an insurance and financial catastrophe on top of a personal and medical one.
But it all began with what seemed like a toothache on Valentine’s Day 2006. By that point, Katie had become a local star admired for both her music — part rock, part folk — and for her stage presence. She had a rambunctious sense of humor and an ability to connect to the loneliest person in the back row. She had recorded four CDs, placed songs on shows like “Dawson’s Creek,” and attracted interest from major labels.
“She was always the kind of writer who would crack open her chest and rub her heart raw,” Dan said.
It seemed a bothersome irritation when the tooth problem arose. But then antibiotics, painkillers, steroids, hyperbaric oxygen therapy, radiation, chemotherapy — nothing seemed to work as what was eventually diagnosed as a rare inflammatory myofibroblastic tumor collapsed the left side of her face and attached itself to the blood vessels in her brain. She became too weak to perform; then the tumor ate into her palate so she could no longer sing and could barely speak. Each turn in the road opened to something worse.
Her doctor, Manuel Revuelta, an internist and infectious disease specialist at Beth Israel Medical Center, said he never saw a crueler case or a more remarkable patient: upbeat, full of life, seemingly hopeful throughout. She insisted on being photographed as the disease worsened. It fit her goal of an open, transparent life, and the photographs showed both her disfigured face and an incongruously joyous glint in her good right eye, as if to say, I’m not what I was, but I’m still me.
As her situation became dire, a fan, Lauren Fernandes, hoping to keep Katie’s voice alive and to raise money for her family and medical care, put up a Web site called “500,000 hits in 365 days.”
Katie leaned on family, bandmates, and on Karen and Dan, often literally. He, it turned out, had success as a playwright (which began when he won the Kennedy Center’s 2001 National Student Playwriting Award) and also suffered from ill health in the form of a genetic disorder of the nervous system that left him barely able to walk.
Katie and Dan read from psalms together in the hospital. And when she was up to it, the two old friends, both very old at 30, held onto each other as they tottered down the hospital hall.
Finally, spent, exhausted and out of hope, for the first time unable to look at her face in the mirror, she died on July 14.
Dan said he and Katie talked to the end about embracing uncertainty while feeling in their gut the visceral presence of God.
Katie’s brother, Robbie, also a musician and also steeped in religion, who lost a newborn child a few years back and his mother to multiple cancers as Katie’s health deteriorated, is less sanguine. “What I would have believed five years ago about God and faith is very different from what I believe now,” he said. “Christians are always throwing around lines about how God is good, God is good all the time, and my take on that is, if that’s true, God’s definition of good is very different than mine. I’m still trying to work it out.”
But, then, in their own ways, they all are. On Saturday morning, with Dan presiding, family, friends and fans of Katie will gather at a church in Cincinnati to hear her voice, hear her band, celebrate her life, contemplate heaven and contemplate earth.
And then family members will gather for pizza and beer, her kind of sacrament, just the way she would have wanted to say goodbye.
By PETER APPLEBOME | The New York Times
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