Six Years

As Anthony's latest post ("Let's not insulate ourselves") hints, the Pomona community -- and indeed the world of literary scholars, readers, writers, and otherwise interested persons -- was beset this past weekend with unspeakable tragedy. We lost the writer of a generation and a teacher of profound meaning to his students.

I write not to reflect on Dave Wallace; I never studied with him, and I have no unique insights to share. While he inspired me, in many ways, to continue to write after entering the MSTP at UCLA, I can't speak to who DFW was as a person. And so I won't try to reminisce or eulogize. But I have some thoughts on death, dying, grief, and how they don't simply bespeak unimaginable tragedy. They - in sum total - offer us some clues into the human experience: the very act of living.

Six years ago today - two weeks into my freshman year of college - a good friend of mine (fellow musician, tennis player, serious student of science and math) was killed in an automobile accident. He was a man of immense promise, who, in his first few days of college was plucked from the earth.

I can remember the entire sequence of events immediately after his death in chilling detail. The message from my roommate. The frantic phone calls. The confusion: was he still alive? Where was he? He's gone? Oh, my god.

The reality: the tears, the shock, the horror. I remember my friend and sister picking me up from Pomona, the drive home to South Pasadena. The vigil at the High School. I remember then staying stoic for an entire week - between the shocking revelation of his death and his memorial service - and then in an instant succumbing to overwhelming emotion. I recall playing the violin for my friend, a musical ode to a fallen artist.

Another week passed. And then I returned home again - two weeks after he had died - this time to see my friend committed to eternity in the ground below.

To return to the sequence of these events still shakes me to the core. Here I was, all of 19 years old, in the midst of the newness of college, and my friend was dead. Certainly, the rest of his friends and I faced an immense collective loss; but my own mortality was suddenly in the forefront of my mind.

As the young (and the old) tend to do, I spent the days, weeks, and months pondering my own life. What would happen if, in a split second, my life were to end? What kind of mark would I have made, and (perhaps most importantly to me at the time) how would people remember me? I recall thinking about this question frequently when walking across the quad at Pomona, during long runs, and sometimes after an evening of drinking as I faded off to sleep. I (and indeed many of my friends) felt robbed - we were robbed of a good human being, a person who made us laugh, smile, and wonder what he would do next; and we were robbed of our innocence and invincibility. Just when we were beginning to gain our intellectual footing on life, and when our minds and bodies were starting to reach unison in their maturity, our new-found stability and confidence was shattered.

Death was indeed difficult for me to swallow. While of course initially it was a question of justice - just how "wrong" it all was - that was just the first stage. Eventually, I returned to reality and could easily note the world is devoid of justice for millions upon millions of persons. The next step was fragility. Could I be next? Just as with the injustice in the world, I too learned to live with the fragility of life. Next was the live life to the fullest ethos so many people talk about. Again, while this seemed an impossible creed to follow, I soon realized that living life to the fullest was just another expression for authenticity. And who the hell can claim that he really ever reaches total and perfect authenticity? (To this day, it is, like total nirvana, an admirable but unattainable goal).

I guess as that first year began to pass, I gradually turned the corner with my grief. (In fairness, I cannot imagine, and in fact know, that this was not the case for his family. For parents, the overwhelming grief that accompanies the loss of a child is thought to last at least five years before any sense of normalcy can be possibly achieved.) For me, the year ushered in a gradual weathering of my temperament. I was a little bit more introspective, and little less worried about how I looked or what I was doing, and my journeys were a little more personal. Of course, this all seemed to be somewhat at the expense of my social connections during year one at Pomona. (Somehow I was a little disconnected from everyone else, and it wasn't until my third year that a core group of friends would be established.)

In that first year, there were hints that, in spite of the indescribable feeling of loss, I was becoming liberated from some of the innocence of life. This indeed sounds like a contradiction-in-terms. But I think that by going to the dark place of death -- seeing your friend lying in state just a month after he was vibrant, alive -- while staying engaged in life, I began to relish in the act of living. Of course I still wept for my friend. I weep several times a year when I remember him - I wept today for a few moments. But I also love the life I am living and the life that I am capable of living. It's not just a sense of "you never know how long you have to live" kind of feeling that drives this. It is the idea that, in the face of grief and sadness, happiness and ecstasy, or anything in the middle, there is a vital energy we all possess. It's an energy my friend had - it was this energy that drove me to weep for him; but it is also an energy that made me look inward. It made me acknowledge the fragility of my life, reassess the impact of my actions, and my relationships with others. It helped me to love others more fully and gladly, and it in turn made me less afraid to talk about my love for others and express it genuinely.

I still don't think I understand anything better; let's just be clear on that. After all, understanding such questions as "When is it our time?", "What is it like in death?", "What is a meaningful life?" are impossible to answer. I guess realizing that, and accepting the somber reality of death in the presence of our lives, makes the act of living less burdensome. We cannot - in our human existence as it stands - truly understand the nature of questions that science, medicine, philosophy, politics, literature, history, and mathematics have never been (and never will be) able to answer.

But, I do think our minds can evolve - our perspective can become richer and the context in which we ask these questions is capable of generous expansion. As evidence of the Epiphany-in-progress that is life, I recently had a dream about my friend. In it, I swear the premise was that he had never left. I couldn't touch him, and we had non-verbal conversations (almost telepathic, I guess), but he had not left. As I tried to make some meaning out of the dream, I reasoned that this all came back to the "energy" of my friend. Both his energy and my energy come from the same divine elements of the universe. And maybe, just maybe, what happened six years ago has helped me to begin to realize that the very energy that makes us unique (and what makes us grieve for our fallen comrades) is energy indivisible from our own. It forever binds us to them, and them to us. It keeps them in our dreams, and transforms our lives. And it is ubiquitous and limitless in our world--it sets us free.