Yale Graduate Dies Days After Graduation

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Marina Keegan, a 22-year-old from Wayland, Massachusetts, died after a car crash in Cape Cod over the holiday weekend. Keegan graduated from Yale University just last week and was planning to have a career in writing. Keegan passed away near 2 p.m. on Saturday when her vehicle was involved in a one-car accident. Her boyfriend, Michael Gocksch, lost control of his Lexus and hit the right guard rail, causing a vehicle rollover. Gocksch, who also graduated from Yale last week, was in stable condition at Cape Cod Hospital as of Monday. Keegan was pronounced dead at the scene of the accident. Police said that speed was not an issue in the crash and both people were wearing seatbelts.

Keegan graduated from Yale magna cum laude with a concentration in writing. Keegan was recently hired by The New Yorker to work as an editorial assistant. She was planning to move to Brooklyn with her friends in June. Keegan belonged to the Occupy Yale group while also writing plays, acting and serving a term as the President of the Yale College Democrats. Over the Memorial Day weekend, Keegan was going to workshop her folk musical, known as ‘Independents.’ The musical was slated to debut in the New York International Fringe Festival sometime in August.

  

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“[Marina] was just one of those amazing, wise souls that was given to us as a gift. She had an unbelievable, beyond-her-years way of looking at the world, and her passion was to try and use her words to explore the human condition,” Tracy Keegan, Marina’s mother, said. “[The musical] is one of her legacies that she will leave behind. I just can’t believe she’s gone. She truly could not have been more excited and happy about getting to embrace the world beyond her college education and it’s nothing less than a crime that she’s not being given that opportunity. She was nothing less than amazing. I honestly feel she was a gift given to all of us.”

Keegan’s final piece as a writer for the Yale Daily News was published on Sunday after her death. The piece was titled ‘The Opposite of Loneliness.’ An excerpt from the piece is below:

“What we have to remember is that we can still do anything. We can change our minds. We can start over. Get a post-bac or try writing for the first time,” Keegan wrote. “The notion that it’s too late to do anything is comical. It’s hilarious. We’re graduating college. We’re so young. We can’t, we MUST not lose this sense of possibility because in the end, it’s all we have.”