Friends celebrate 20-year-old cancer victim, former Welsh Hall resident
By TIM LOGAN
Senior Staff Writer
Funny.
Loyal.
Resilient.
This is how Brionne Clary's friends will remember the junior, who died last Wednesday of complications from leukemia.
"She was an amazing person," said Kate Downen, who would have lived across from Clary this year in Welsh Family Hall. "Sometimes she could be crazy, off the wall. She was the most caring, deep-down wonderful person."
Clary loved basketball, and she played on Welsh's interhall team and a Bookstore Basketball squad that reached the Final Four of last year's women's tournament. The Welsh team will frame her number 51 jersey and put it and a plaque in the dorm, said Katie Rak, a teammate of Clary. The dorm will also likely have a memorial Mass in her honor later this year, and may plant a tree in her memory.
Clary was sarcastic and sweet at the same time.
"She had a really funny sense of humor," Downen said. "She could say something obnoxious to you but it was completely in love and jest. She was just funny like that."
And that sense of humor showed. During last year's Bookstore Basketball tournament, Clary's team, five Welsh interhall players, came up against a team comprised of the other five Welsh interhall players. The contest got very competitive, and there was tension between the two teams.
"Brionne was the one to step in and say, `come on you guys, we're friends,'" Rak said. "She just had this personality where, everyone started laughing. She puts on this goofy grin and all of a sudden, they were putty in her hands."
While Clary loved basketball, she also loved her friends. And she was loyal.
"If she was your friend, she was always your friend," said Kate Stephan, who would have been Clary's neighbor this year. "You could always count on her, no matter what; always."
Clary, from Tyler, Texas, had staved off leukemia once before, when she was in high school. But in August, just a week before she was to return to Notre Dame, the disease came back. No one at Notre Dame had known how serious the illness had been in high school, and Clary did not talk about it a lot. Her friends said coming to Notre Dame gave her a chance to be remembered for something else.
"She wasn't that person," Stephan said. "She wasn't the person with the disease.'"
After Clary contracted leukemia for the second time, she fought it off for a month before succumbing. But even during that time, only a few people knew about her illness. That was the way she wanted it.
"So many people didn't know she was sick at all," said her roomate Sarah Miller. "It wasn't anything she wanted broadcast."
Through that time, Clary was, as usual, optimistic, hoping to return in January and making off-campus living plans for next year with her roommates.
"She would say, `I'm going to try my hardest to get here, I don't know if it'll be next semester, but I'll be back,'" said Ellen Knarr, who also would have lived next door to Clary.
But never seeing Clary sick made her death more difficult to deal with, at least for Rak.
"We didn't get to see her between the time that we heard she was sick and last week," she said. "And that was the hardest thing because we couldn't put a sick face on Brionne."
Several of her friends traveled to Texas for the funeral on Monday, and while there they got a glimpse of where their friend had come from. Clary's high school basketball team came to the service, wearing their red letter jackets, and her strong parents consoled their daughter's friends.
"That was the amazing thing, they were comforting us," Downen said.
Her friends said the events of the last week have made them look at things a little differently.
"It definitely puts things in perspective. People keep talking about tests and classes and things like that, that doesn't really mean anything to me right now," Rak said. "My friends mean so much to me. It makes you think I should tell that person what they mean to me."
Now Clary is gone. But her friends will remember her for a lot of things — her sense of humor, her love of basketball, her loyalty, her personality.
"Her 20 years are incredible," Stephan said. "She probably lived her 20 years as full as anyone could live their life."
All News Stories for Thursday, September 28, 2000
