When people do posts on their blogs or Twitter or random online page to invite questions about their lives and thoughts--'Ask me anything and I'd answer'--my favorite question is always 'What's your one fear in life?' My answer would be suffering from terminal illness and hanging on to life in misery and having no family around. My other answer, which looms larger and much closer in my daily life, is that people around me would suddenly drop dead by a cruel stroke of fate or by their own hand.
In my early twenties, a school friend of mine was killed in a car crash as the bus flew over the flimsy barriers on the highway and plunged straight to the bottom of the slope. One July morning Ivy was still Ivy and she hopped on the bus to go to work, young and tall and dozing off by the windows to her usual dreams. By the day's end Ivy was no longer Ivy and her face was never seen again except by her family, hospital and funeral parlor staff. Her face was disfigured from head trauma; it was enough to hear her parents' cries.
I spent the night weeping by the computer and checking on news updates and my phone--I had texted my friend H., who was very close to Ivy, to see if she was well but received no response. By early morning I was reading all these stories of Ivy related by her students and their parents, looking at photos of Ivy at a school picnic and other glimpses I had never seen before. The worst was the photos of those 7-year-old students crying by their tables. Their grief compounded mine and I went to lie down on the couch.
This public dimension of this incident has stayed with me. It still strikes me as incredibly eerie: my private emotions were forever polluted by strangers' words, sensational reports of an unfortunate death that became 'public property'. Even my anger turned unreal. I was angry at the government which had obviously failed us, but what difference did it make to stare at the sorry face of the responsible official when all I could do was to sit at home and shed my tears? Would they hear my anger, would they give a fuck about it?
My friend H. wrote back to me the next day. She had been at a camping site with a group of students--how she managed to stay calm for the day I had no idea. Since then we have only spoken of Ivy twice. Both times we were walking under dying trees along the pavement, on ambience of traffic that rang like distant sounds of summer.
In my early twenties, a school friend of mine was killed in a car crash as the bus flew over the flimsy barriers on the highway and plunged straight to the bottom of the slope. One July morning Ivy was still Ivy and she hopped on the bus to go to work, young and tall and dozing off by the windows to her usual dreams. By the day's end Ivy was no longer Ivy and her face was never seen again except by her family, hospital and funeral parlor staff. Her face was disfigured from head trauma; it was enough to hear her parents' cries.
I spent the night weeping by the computer and checking on news updates and my phone--I had texted my friend H., who was very close to Ivy, to see if she was well but received no response. By early morning I was reading all these stories of Ivy related by her students and their parents, looking at photos of Ivy at a school picnic and other glimpses I had never seen before. The worst was the photos of those 7-year-old students crying by their tables. Their grief compounded mine and I went to lie down on the couch.
This public dimension of this incident has stayed with me. It still strikes me as incredibly eerie: my private emotions were forever polluted by strangers' words, sensational reports of an unfortunate death that became 'public property'. Even my anger turned unreal. I was angry at the government which had obviously failed us, but what difference did it make to stare at the sorry face of the responsible official when all I could do was to sit at home and shed my tears? Would they hear my anger, would they give a fuck about it?
My friend H. wrote back to me the next day. She had been at a camping site with a group of students--how she managed to stay calm for the day I had no idea. Since then we have only spoken of Ivy twice. Both times we were walking under dying trees along the pavement, on ambience of traffic that rang like distant sounds of summer.
This is utterly gorgeous, Nicole.
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