A life's words; Kirsten Bergh died last Thanksgiving weekend at the age of 17. Thanks to the writing and artwork she left behind, her mother has learned that it's not only time that heals. So can poems.(NEWS) - Star Tribune (Minneapolis, MN)

At 17, Kirsten Bergh had a way with language that wordsmiths twice her age could envy. Last Thanksgiving Day, the budding poet wrote in her journal:

'I walk, with my breath, up our road of everyday, new in its Thanksgiving gauze of snow. The trees like princesses, getting dressed in their first layer of silk and lace . . . almost too elegant and lovely to be the same trees, in November peasant rags, as were there yesterday.'

That journal entry turned out to be her last. Two days after writing her Thanksgiving poem, Kirsten and her longtime friend Nina Dietzel had set out for a Saturday morning jaunt to the Salvation Army, to rummage for retro-clothing bargains. They were killed instantly when the station wagon Kirsten was driving skidded into the path of a semitrailer truck.

Since then, Kirsten's mother, Linda Bergh, has had to cope with more than the loss of her only child. Bergh was a passenger in the car, having arrived the night before for a holiday visit in the upstate New York town where Kirsten and Nina were attending a Waldorf high school. Bergh broke every bone in her face, lost an eye and was hospitalized for seven weeks. Just 15 months before, her husband and Kirsten's father, Paul Bergh, had died of cardiac arrest.

This overdose of tragedy could be enough to send anyone over the edge, even a trained psychotherapist such as Bergh. But the poems Kirsten left behind have helped her mother - as she puts it - to 'transform her loss' into something less painful. What she didn't realize was how much Kirsten's optimism, honesty and insights would resonate with other teens, and help them articulate their own grief.

Last spring, Bergh collected 64 of Kirsten's poems and her artwork into a self-published book, 'She Would Draw Flowers,' partly as a keepsake to give Kirsten's mourners at a memorial service held in April, partly as a task to keep herself from sinking into an emotional abyss. Since then she has given away more than 3,000 copies to kids and schools, and teachers say that even the most impassive students are visibly moved when the poems are read aloud in classes. It has been used by social workers in teen halfway houses, hospices and bereaved-parent groups.

'Our culture needs to find ways of dealing with grief that go beyond advice from TV gurus,' Bergh said on a recent afternoon, sitting on a sofa in her Linden Hills home in Minneapolis, surrounded by reminders of Kirsten, including the wispy paintings with which she had been fond of decorating the household walls - fairies, trees that appear half-human, florid sunsets. 'In some small way, Kirsten's poems do that, because, since they were written by someone their own age, kids feel included in them.'

Browsing through the poems, alternately addressing topics serious ('For You, Papa') and silly-sweet ('Ode to Ringo'), it becomes clear why. Kirsten's obvious gift for imagery never gets in the way of what it means to be a teenager, with all the attendant groping, stumbling and emoting, the sunshine-and-mountains metaphors that get interpreted as melodramatic pap by adults all doped up with world-weariness.

Pat Heine, an education professor who teaches adolescent literature at St. Cloud State University, calls Kirsten's use of language 'honest, fresh and rich.' The poems have affected her both as an educator and a mother, she said: 'It shows what can happen when artistic expression is valued in a curriculum. And there's no better document of love a parent could have to hold onto after losing a child.'

Waldorf encouraged talent

Kirsten spent eight years at the Minnesota Waldorf School in Roseville, where her mother taught kindergarten, before going to Southwest High. By all accounts, she blossomed under the holistic creative-development emphasis of the Waldorf system. 'She Would Draw Flowers' includes fanciful sketches, many of them ballpoint-pen doodles lifted from the margins of her school notebooks, that show her dual talent as a visual artist.

Several of the poems came from Kirsten's 'idea book,' which traveled with her like a fifth limb. For that, Bergh has Art Froehle to thank. He is the teacher who urged Kirsten to begin keeping the book when she was in ninth grade.

'Kirsten was straight with everyone, without setting herself apart,' he said. ' She was one of those rare kids who could draw all sorts of other ones in.'

Her friend Katy Clarke agrees: 'She said things I wanted to say, but was too afraid to say.'

In most ways, Kirsten was an everygirl, with a New Age bent. She favored clothes held together with bright patches, scarves and pins, and made fun of the high-water way Mom wore her jeans. She expressed an intense spiritual connection to nature and dreamed of going to Africa to help save endangered mammals. She also had heated arguments with her parents over trivialities.

Outwardly confident after spending the year after eighth grade with her parents in France, she shied away from most sports except swimming because she had a weak foot and didn't want to look stupid.

When her father lapsed into a coma before he died, she sat next to his hospital bed and sang his favorite songs in an attempt to revive him, until she started hyperventilating and her mother had to put a paper bag over her head.

She was an idolized big sister to 16-year-old Molly O'Brien, who with her parents, Patrick and Diana, had an 'upstairs, downstairs' relationship with the Berghs, sharing a house and child-care duties.

'It's hard to read her book for too long, but it makes me feel like she's talking to me,' Molly said.

Kirsten's left-behind words have the power not only to comfort, but also to inspire. Since her death, Clarke and other teens who knew her have written tribute poems. Froehle has begun using Kirsten's work as a teaching tool alongside Walt Whitman's 'O Captain! My Captain!' and T.S. Eliot's 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.'

Kirsten and Nina had spent only two months at the Hawthorne Valley School in Harlemville, N.Y., but their deaths shook the small town. At a memorial service held there, a silent, uncomfortable-looking stranger suddenly spoke up when the time came for individual eulogies. The man, a farmer, told of how, a week earlier, this girl had walked past him as he worked in his fields, stopped, and asked 'What's your favorite song?' Startled, he mumbled the name of a Beatles tune. Kirsten said, 'I know that one - let's sing it!' After he had seen her picture in the paper, he just had to come, he said.

Kirsten's skills, and her attitude, call to mind another coming-of-age story, 'The Diary of Anne Frank.' While the two girls' circumstances were hardly similar, both were adept at filtering mature insights through a youthful, idealistic mind.

In fact, adults as well as teens have written to Bergh after reading the book, including 'a 48-year-old woman who just broke up with her husband who listed the exact four poems that helped her get through it,' Bergh said.

Kirsten didn't think of her voice as universal. When Bergh suggested sending some poems out to prospective publishers, Kirsten said, 'Of course you think they're great. You're my mom.'

A continuing mission

Physically, Bergh appears to be almost healed. But often, when she speaks of Kirsten, she seems like a china plate that must be handled delicately because it has been broken and glued together and is not yet quite dry.

'I don't know how you define angels,' she said. 'But I feel that Kirsten came to me with Paul right before I left the hospital, sat at the edge of my bed and said, `We're here.' Whether that vision was something I created doesn't matter. It was what made me able to go on.'

Bergh still lives above her extended family, the O'Briens, with her Shar Pei dog, Betty Boop; two cats, and a squirrel that found its way into the crawl space over her kitchen ceiling. 'I'm taking it as as a sign that I need to lighten up,' she said.

This weekend, which she is spending with the O'Briens in their cabin on Lake Superior, Bergh plans to light a candle for Kirsten and Nina. She hasn't worked since the accident, and is not sure whether she'll return to being a therapist. But she does feel driven to spread Kirsten's poems in a wider arc, to be used as a catalyst for emotional expression.

'I worry about all the things kids feel that don't get out, because they don't think they have permission to talk about them. We've got to listen to kids when they're still open, still brutally honest, before their perceptions get covered by propriety, or fear.'

Nina Dietzel, whose parents and two siblings live in Golden Valley, had been pals with Kirsten since kindergarten. She was the quiet one of the hand-in-glove duo. But she also kept a journal, in which she once wrote of her friend: 'Her soul is on some great and awesome mission.'

The day before they died, Kirsten wrote her friend a letter Nina never got to read, found months afterward by Nina's mother, Marianne. In it, she wrote of how they would 'grow strong and beautiful, two girls becoming women. The world will be a little bit better because of us, even if our names are forgotten after our death . . . But 'til then, 'til tomorrow, I'll remember to love the snow and you'll begin to love skirts over Sorels and the world and life will hold us like a mother.'

As things turned out, the world and life did not behave as Kirsten predicted. But in the words and pictures collected by her mother, her mission, though cut short, is accomplished.

Linda Bergh will sign copies of 'She Would Draw Flowers' from 12:30 to 1:30 p.m. Monday at the Barnes & Noble bookstore at 9th St. and Nicollet Mall in downtown Minneapolis. The book ($9.95) is also available at other area stores, including Borders and the Hungry Mind.

1/3 To Nina & Me

When we're grandmas together Maybe we'll be soft and beautiful like clouds And sweet and rosy with laughter like apples And we'll be free and graceful Like the summer grasses Of our barefoot youth. Maybe you'll still have dimples, Curled up like two fetuses in your cheeks Creased with countless births and smiles. And maybe there will still be Freckles scattered across my nose Like the huts of an African village in the heat Hiding in the wrinkles that gather at my eyes Like animals 'round the water hole.

And we'll tell our wide-eyed grandbabies About iced-grapefruit chapstick.