Kara was the first at everything.

When we were all campers at Stella Maris, Kara was the first to jump into the icy lake water and she was the first to beat all the boys at a basketball-shooting contest. When we got on staff together, Kara was the first one to admit how terrified she was at the new summer job. She was the first to find a gorgeous boyfriend, the first to say she was in love. After a day at the beach in Rochester when we both impulsively decided to get our belly buttons pierced, she volunteered to go first. Situations that made me nervous, or I found dangerous and scary, Kara found fun and just a normal part of embracing life.

We worked together at Camp Stella Maris for three summers, and Kara often stayed with my family on weekends when she didn't have time to make the drive back to Syracuse. Is it a cliche to think back on those times and remember nothing but adventures? Like sneaking down behind the chapel for a cigarette and some gossip; running down to the lake for a midnight swim without the rest of staff; going to her brother's when he wasn't home or to her grandparents' cabin to skinny dip. Yet most of our fun together was just spent talking. God, she was so interesting...

I just wanted into that mind of hers. She amazed me in so many ways, and growing up I wanted some of that. I wanted to understand how someone could be so blessed with money but still be so self-less. How can a family with so many kids doing so many things be so very close? How can someone be so daring, and so bold to go first at everything, but at the same time be so sensitive and loving to so many different people? How could a woman pull off being so athletic, but also so sexy and feminine at the same time like she did?

A few years after our last full summer together Kara came back to CSM for a two-week stint. On our final night together we snuck out after midnight, went up to the caretaker's workshop, and found several old name signs from the camp cabins. There were three of us and we each decided to steal the name of our favorite cabin. I took Jogues, my first cabin as a camper and as staff. Kara took Ave's sign, because of her memories from there. The signs were hung high and there was no ladder to reach them, so we pushed a three-wheeler up to the wall. In classic Kara style, she was the first to climb up that rolling vehicle which wouldn't stay steady. She stayed up there to take all three signs down because we were too scared to climb up ourselves. And yet I was not worried for her because she was someone who never seemed to get hurt pulling those stunts.

While walking back to our beds with our signs, we agreed we would grow up and hang our cabin names over our bathroom doors when we had homes of our own. We would teach our children that instead of asking to go to the bathroom they would ask to go to the "Ave" or the "Jogues." We all agreed to torment our kids this way, and that when the three of us got together 20 years from now we would tell them our story and they would understand how much the deep friendship we formed at Camp Stella Maris meant to us:

It meant reaching deeper and stronger and more lovingly into someone else who could have been so very different from you, and finding a connection so spiritual and so equal that it made you close no matter how many times she went to Africa or how long it had been since we'd last seen each other.

Kara always went first. And in January I learned just how true that was.

I have to remember how I felt when she would always go before me in life. I felt safer; I felt that if she could do it then so could I; and I felt watched and protected. Because what ever it was that Kara had just done, she would turn around and look at me, watching, helping, and encouraging me from the other side.