April 19, 2007
Thursday

What if you knew her and found her dead on the ground?
How can you run when you know?
        — Neil Young, b. 1945
            Canadian singer-songwriter
            “Ohio,” about the Kent State shootings of May 4, 1970

I was all about work on Monday, writing like it’s my job. (It is.) I spent the early part of the morning reviewing and commenting on manuscripts for the fiction workshop group I’ve been participating in. I took a break, answered some e-mail, and then noodled around for something to write about here.

I considered the things I’d been doing since I stopped gushing about my hair. I attended the funeral of the mother of my sister’s high school boyfriend (don’t want to write about funerals again yet), coped with fierce winds and icy overcast skies that threatened to pull me into “the mind of winter” that I hadn’t actually experienced this year (writing about the weather is so ho-hum), and discovered to my horror that the can of coffee Ron opened the night before was hazelnut, bought by mistake (flavored coffee is an abomination.)

That seemed promising — a little slice of suburban life, a mini-rant on the silliness of too many versions of common things in packaging that is too similar. (Did you know you can get fat-free cream cheese and fat-free half-and-half, and that I have actually purchased some because careless shoppers or stockboys let these vile impostors mix in with the genuine ones?) I was in high dudgeon about the overly-sweet smell of the hazelnut extract permeating the house and probably bonding permanently with the coffeemaker so that we should probably just bury it and start anew when Ron called up the stairs. “Turn on CNN. Now.”

The events of April 16 in Blacksburg, Virginia (and the aftermath of reporting and second-guessing and hand-wringing) have drawn me in as compellingly as the events of October 2 in Bart Township, Pennsylvania did. The stories are hard to watch but also hard to turn away from. I have always been someone who felt others’ pain, or who tried to, usually finding some personal angle which could engage my empathy as well as my sympathy.

I was 19 when Charles Whitman shot at random from the clock tower in Austin, Texas, killing 16 and wounding 31, many of them college students like me. I was 23 when four young people died at Kent State University in Ohio. I was teaching but still in my mind more their peer, having only six months before been among those protesting the war in Washington, D.C.

By the time of the Columbine tragedy in 1999 I was one year beyond a long career as a secondary school teacher and online as a writer of personal observations on the passing scene. And I was the mother of a middle school child. I felt that event deeply because I saw the teachers as my peers and the students as all the youngsters I knew. And when I got the news of the events of October 2, I was someone who had studied the Amish culture and come to love one family with whom I’d spent every Tuesday one summer learning their language and their simple ways.

The events of April 16 have left me grieving, even though I don’t know anyone directly involved nor do I know anyone who knows anyone. But I have among my circle of friends a lot of twenty-somethings, and I see their faces and all their young energy in the shaken survivors as well as the still photos of the ones who have been lost. Readers of this space know that in recent months, (since my friend Michael died without my being able to say goodbye, mostly because I hadn’t tried hard enough to say hello in far too long), I’ve been driven to make contact with people long absent from my life and strengthen bonds with those whose presence is more constant but which can easily be taken for granted.

And something seems to be at work in others, too. On the pretext of needing a new hat with a university logo, Ron went down to Millersville on Tuesday to have dinner with Lynn. I spent last evening with a former student, now a young married woman whose friendship has become a source of joy. The evening had been arranged for some weeks, but its timing seemed significant, and appropriate. Every time I opened my e-mail there was a note from someone just writing to say hi. One of them, out of touch for several months, wrote, “We are blessed to know and to care about each other,” the first time in nearly forty years I’ve known him to use such tender language.

I’m in a place in my life when my biggest problem appears to be having to spend one morning inhaling the fumes of hazelnut coffee. But I’ve known terrible sadness almost (almost) unto despair in my life. The individual who caused the events of April 16, like the one who caused the events of October 2 in Bart Township, was possessed of a pain so profound I cannot begin to be able to talk about it. All I can say is that I am grateful beyond my ability to express it for the love that surrounds me and that, should darkling shadows ever close in on me again, will keep me far from the edge of the abyss.