A Shadow on the Moon

A friend used to say that grief is a shadow on the moon that darkens the night into almost unbearable blackness.

The shadow must pass slowly across the moon’s face before the light is restored and the night softened by lingering memories.

It takes longer for grief to fade when the object of sorrow is your child, leaving traces of laughter in an empty room or the ashes of a smile across a playground to remind us of a presence that no longer exists.

Bernice Kraemer understands that. She can speak of her Karen now without crying, though her voice chokes slightly, and can boast of her accomplishments without expecting her to walk into the room.

“I’m proud of her life,” she says to me as we sit at a kitchen table on a gray and blustery day in the Valley. “She was a bright candle.”

How bright that candle could have burned will never be known. Karen Kraemer, the daughter of Ed and Bernice, died in full blossom at age 35, throwing a shadow across the moon that was awesome for one so young.

That was five years ago. What brings me back to it today are the compelling memories of her daughter offered by Bernice in a world of rattled values and diminished ambitions.

Journalist, scholar, sculptor, world traveler, public service attorney and altruist beyond her years, destiny filled Karen’s life to overflowing, and she strode through it with an ebullience difficult to assess.

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I heard of Karen through a letter from her mother and got to know her seated at a kitchen table. People intrigue me. What makes them work? What drives them across the years of their lives and what, in the end, gives them the courage to face a final darkness?

I see her photographs and form a picture of a girl/woman full of energy and laughter who never lost either: Karen on a rocking horse, Karen with braces on her teeth, Karen graduating from high school, Karen on her wedding day, Karen a blink away from dying . . .

“Her elegance,” a doctor who treated her wrote, “filled the room.”

An honors student in high school, she dreamed of being a journalist and worked as a reporter for the Claremont Courier while attending Pomona College. Later she studied law as a more direct way of helping people, passing bar exams in both California and New York.

She managed at different times to travel in Israel, Egypt and Jordan and backpacked through Europe, a young woman in the Age of Woman on her way to a goal she seemed certain to achieve. A figure she sculpted in college is the woman Karen seemed destined to be, full of strength and grace and iron will.

“She wanted to help everyone,” Bernice Kraemer says, going through the pictures and clippings that comprise her daughter’s life. Toward that goal, Karen gave time and energy as a mediator, a pro bono attorney and a teacher.

In the end, she could help everyone but herself.

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Karen came down with Hodgkin’s disease in 1989. Chemotherapy and radiation seemed to relieve its symptoms, and all concerned thought she had beaten it. During this period, she was reunited with a college friend, Carl Gunn. They fell in love and were married.

When the symptoms returned and her immune system crashed, a bone marrow transplant was conducted with her brother, Brad, as a donor. Brad’s twin, Glen, completed the close Kraemer family. Carl became an integral part of it, and all stood by the young woman fighting for her life.

The transplant seemed to work. Hospitalized for a year, Karen gained back her energy, burning once more with a desire to help. She lobbied for an access ramp for patients in wheelchairs and for a television set to relieve the tension of those waiting to receive treatment.

“She was full of life,” her mother says, for a moment not quite believing that her quick and shining daughter, her bright candle, is gone. “We all thought she’d make it.”

So powerful was Karen’s brief presence that when she died, the county Board of Supervisors adjourned in her memory and a fund was established in her name for a new bone marrow lab at the City of Hope. The nurses who tended her cried.

There was a quality to Karen Kraemer too vast to define in this small space. She was larger than her own life, and we are left to wonder about her and about the shadow that darkened the face of the moon so deeply.

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Al Martinez’s column appears on Tuesdays and Fridays. He can be reached online at al.martinez@latimes.com