Another obituary:
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The Boston GlobeOBITUARIESGracie James, whose writing gleamed with insights; at 17By Bryan Marquard
Globe Staff / November 5, 2010
Gracie James had an affinity for nature's soothing presence.With a poet's unsparing insight, Gracie James contemplated the border between hope and despair.
"There is a fine line between happiness and depression, doubt and trust, acceptance and regret," she wrote a year and a half ago, when she was 15 and a student at Arlington High School. "If there's one thing I've learned, it's that time is the medicine for countless situations."
Healed and sometimes harmed, she could sense redemption in a casual gesture, a benediction in a subtle approval.
"Maybe you can find it in the smallest things," she wrote. "Like a smile or a tear, or a simple nod of the head, demonstrating understanding, saying, 'I know what you mean,' because that's all we want to hear."
Three weeks after turning 17, Miss James was a passenger in a sport utility vehicle with others enrolled in a Utah boarding school for teenage girls trying to regain their emotional bearings. Sitting in front, she adjusted the radio, setting a soundtrack for their ride. On the way to Arches National Park in the southeastern part of the state, the vehicle went off Interstate 70 near Sevier and rolled over, police said. Miss James suffered severe head injuries and died three days later, on Oct. 20, in Provo.
Precocious as a writer, Miss James fared well in contests and exhibited natural abilities as a figure skater in early adolescence before turning to alcohol and marijuana in high school to ease her struggle with depression. At the Sunrise Residential Treatment Program in Hurricane, Utah, she responded quickly to the therapy, said her mother, Chris Bobel of Arlington.
"It's tragic enough that our daughter was killed at 17," Bobel said. "It's even more tragic that she was turning her life around, that she had recommitted to living a healthy life that she could be proud of. It's devastating."
At Arlington High, Miss James could create quickly, composing a poem in class and slipping it into a friend's hands minutes later in the hallway.
"When I read her poetry, I could hardly believe that she could write it because it was so good," said Nora Blake, a friend and classmate. "She would leave me letters, and she would write them the way she talked to you, so you could hear her voice."
Miss James had written so much, so poignantly, that the eulogy at her memorial service Sunday will be composed mostly from her prose and poems.
"She wrote this wonderful poem about accepting death to my mother when she was dying," said Miss James's stepfather, Thomas Hartl. "It expressed emotions the whole family was struggling with, and she put it in such beautiful words. I read it and just cried because it was so, so beautiful. It made my mother cry, but they were good tears."
In the poem, "Hedda," named for her grandmother, Miss James wrote in part:
Remember everything you've touched:
The hands of those you love,
Tears of the sky on your face,
The hearts you've soothed and comforted.[/list]
Grace Christine James was born in Whitewater, Wis. She was named Grace after a relative who played a significant role in her mother's life. In an autobiography, Miss James wrote: "Christina is my mom's name so she gave me the middle name Christine. . . . My last name is my dad's first name, James, instead of his last name, Lundy, which I suppose is unusual in American culture."
Her parents parted when she was young.
After Bobel married Hartl, who is from Germany, European trips helped make Miss James worldly, "but she was always pretty modest about that," her mother said. "She was really very connected to her town. She loved Arlington, she loved her home."
Miss James was 7 when she moved to Arlington, which soon became home to her mother, stepfather, father, and also to her 16-year-old stepbrother, Craig Hartl, and her younger sister, Zoe Habel, born when Gracie was 9.
With Miss James's poems, essays, short stories, and journals, "it felt like she was writing beyond her years," her mother said. "In the metaphors she would conjure, she was bold and unafraid to take risks."
Figure skating provided respite from the emotions of life, where friendships Miss James valued could also overwhelm.
Gracie, Bobel added, "had this capacity to connect with people that was rooted in her almost precocious empathy. Because of that, she was also very vulnerable. She took relationships seriously, she took friendships very seriously, so it cut both ways. A cross word would really hurt."
In addition to her mother, father, stepfather, sister, and stepbrother, Miss James leaves her grandmother Sally (Ferraro) Bobel of Lorain, Ohio, and her grandfather Heinrich Hartl of Hanau, Germany.
Family and friends will gather to celebrate her life at 5 p.m. Sunday in First Parish Cambridge, the Unitarian Universalist church in Harvard Square.
The accident damaged Gracie's brain in ways that could not be reversed. Her family asked doctors to remove her from life support on Oct. 20, and word spread around the world through the family's circles of friends. Many paused at that moment to listen to Miss James's favorite song, Death Cab for Cutie's "I Will Follow You Into the Dark," in which the singer quietly offers: "If there's no one beside you/When your soul embarks/Then I'll follow you into the dark."
The next day, Bobel said, many of Miss James's friends attended Arlington High wearing green, her favorite color, because it evokes nature's soothing presence. Friends plan to don green again for Sunday's service.
"I used to think I knew what love was," she wrote at 15, "but I've realized that love is the most complex sensation in the world, partly because it's a mix of everything there is to feel. Finding a definition for it could take a lifetime, and in the end it's still only a theory."
© Copyright 2010 Globe Newspaper Company.