Her Lover's In The Distance As She Wipes A Tear From Her Eye, Ruby's Fading Out, She Disappears, It's Time, Time To Say Goodbye
--"Ruby Soho", Rancid
This time of year is always difficult for me. Aside from Breannie's birthday (twenty-ninth already?), the dates I recall the most from late April/early May is that April 20th is the anniversary of Columbine and May 14th is the anniversary of Jennifer's passing. They were both significant events in my life, the former for philosophical reasons and the latter for personal reasons, and they both continue to have a profound effect I believe on how I turned out. Not a year goes by that I don't know exactly what day it is when the 20th and 14th roll around. I might forget my parents' birthdays year after year. I might forget what month Mother's Day and Father's Day fall in every year. I might forget exactly how old my car is. But I never forget what happened on those two days.
It's just every other day of the year that the memories are starting to dim.
I remember riding up to DeAnn's house on the day of April 20th, 1999. We were supposed to have spent the day together doing what we usually did, catching a movie followed by going out to dinner. Even then I intentionally had broken the car antenna off my car so when I arrived at the house what had happened had caught me completely by surprise. It had maybe been into its second hour by the time I had sat down in front of the television with her and the rest of her family.
I remember watching the whole thing rather detached because, up until that time, no one had ever covered a prolonged shooting/hostage situation in a high school before. Maybe they had--who knows--but I had never been in a position to watch the whole thing from an adult perspective. I felt it more, more than I would have had I still been at La Salle watching the coverage in some classroom. I think it affected me so much because a) I had a friend still in high school and b) the news reports kept coming back to the fact that this wasn't some spur-of-the-moment incident. The suspects had come in well-equipped and seemed to be adhering to some thought-out plan of action. I'd seen random violence perpetrated by teens before. Hell, I'd even taken part in some myself, but I had never seen people that young so calculatedly evil. I had never borne witness to that level of nefariousness.
A few weeks later I hit upon the angle that would be the touchstone that would make Columbine one of my all-time defining moments: Rachel Joy Scott. Here was a girl, only slightly older than my closest friend, and a devout Christian to boot. If she could be gunned down like that then no one was really safe. I mean--I knew children died all the time around the world and I knew that a lot of good people get killed every day as well, but Rachel was the first story where I had the opportunity to read first-hand how good she was. When Rachel's Tears came out and I could read first-hand what she was all about, what she was thinking, and what she had planned for her future it became conclusive that she was one of the good ones, and that she didn't deserve to die. Unlike people I thought I knew at the time, the fact she had recorded some of these deeper thoughts on paper and shared some of them with other people, it was far easier to see the light she had which many others don't possess.
That's when I started thinking about what it meant to live a good life and leaving a cherished legacy behind when you died. After reading her first book and the subsequent ones I started to contemplate that due to my deistic beliefs I couldn't afford to continue to live the life I was leading. If my few years on Earth were all I had to prove my worth then I couldn't waste time dicking around. I guess Rachel's death, because she was so young and because she was so good-hearted, became the catalyst to turning my life around, however small that turn might be. It wasn't because I was seeking to emulate her fame. It wasn't like I was thinking if I become a saint I might get a book deal too. It wasn't because I thought I had any chance of becoming as pious as her. I started simply realizing that any one of us might die at any moment and that it's better to be remembered for all the constructive things you did than for all the destructive things you did.
I began coming to the conclusion the path I was headed down--what with being physically violent, rather standoffish, and almost unfeeling when it came to most of my friends and family--was a very destructive one. If I had died at that point in my life there would have been nothing to show for my life except the wreckage it left behind.
Almost from the very day I finished Rachel's Tears I became a different person. I wouldn't say a totally good person, but I definitely became a better person, someone I at least could live with being remembered as. At the heart of it was trying to do honor to Rachel's memory and to the rest of the kids who died on that day. In those first few years I would invoke her name at the drop of a hat. I would recount anecdotes from her books, I would quote ceaselessly, and I would profess my admiration for her to anyone who would listen. She and the work she did with her time became a central philosophy for my own life.
It was the same when Jennifer died. She too was a good person and she too died far too young. Indeed, it was a reaffirmation of my basic principle that I needed to turn my life around when she died. Rather than being somebody I had read up on and studied from the news and the internet, she was a life-and-breath person I had gone to lunch with countless times, I had probably had a thousand conversations with, and had kind of gotten used to the idea of being friends with for decades to come. You could say when she died in 2003 I became refocused to take her place in the world.
She never wrote any books.
She never became a small celebrity.
But her death was just as bone-jarring as Rachel's had been and a thousand times moreso because I had seen her somewhat in the end. I became obsessed with the idea that I needed to take her place in the world. Like Rachel, she was far too decent of a person to have been called away, and I had crazy thoughts of how much damage her not being in the world was doing to it. It's almost like she had left a huge hole in the way the world was supposed to turn out and somebody, namely me, had to fill it in as best as they could. I didn't cause her death, but it almost became my quest to be the one good result of her dying. I wanted to make the rest of my life a tribute to her words and deeds that she had taught me in our time together, I wanted to make that my gift to her.
I spent a number of years trying to live up to that ideal.
ruby's fading out, she disappears
it's time, time to say goodbye
----
However, now that it's 2009, now that it's almost the tenth anniversary of Columbine, now that it's almost the sixth anniversary of my friend's fading away, I'm struck with the thought that I'm not as obsessed with keeping their memory alive as I had been. Coming up with an idea for this piece was as surprising as anything that's happened to me recently. I realized that it had been almost a whole year since I'd even thought about Rachel and two years since I last read anything by her. I realized that aside from the occasional posts I place here about Jennifer, I don't really spend my days trying to do what she would have done. I mean--I still think I try to live up to the ideals their deaths set for me, but I realized I don't spend nearly enough time thinking about them, about their lives.
It's a funny thing, memories. There was a time where I would think about either one of them twenty times in a day, when I would say their name a hundred times, or when I would reminisce with someone about them at least once or twice a week. Now all of that has come to a complete halt. It isn't because I stopped idolizing them as much; I still carry as much admiration for them as the day they died. It isn't because I stopped thinking they were important to me; they will always be some of the most important people I've gotten to know. And it isn't because I stopped believing in what they had to stay; trust me, I still believe.
What I think has happened is that the wounds aren't fresh any more, the sadness and sorrow from their tragic ends has all but dried up.
Honestly, all that I feel now about them is how much they've made my life better. When they first died, when it first happened, the bitterness and the angst were what drove me to reflect on them so much. It's easy to slide down that sadness spiral, where the more you think about disheartening events, the more you talk about it. And the more you talk about it, the more you think about it. It's different when a person's memory makes you happy. There's only one all-purpose state of happiness and you don't need a continual cause to be happy. The initial spark is usually enough.
The truth is their dying set me on a course that's led to some great things in my life. I fully attribute my getting the hell out of Sierra Madre, the sense of independence and freedom I know have, and the upturn in people I can count on and trust to the two of them. They've made my life several degrees more fulfilling. And for that I can't thank them enough. I'm not saying I never get sad. I'm saying, even when I do, because of what they taught me it's never as bad as it was before and it never lasts for as long as it did back then.
Unlike a sadness spiral, thinking about their contributions to my life do not cause me to recite them to everyone I meet any more. It's like my happiness, though caused in part by them, is my own. I don't give them credit for that as much as I might have once had. I think that's the point of happiness; that you feel in control of it, that you feel like you're more or less responsible for maintaining it. Sadness is easy to pin on somebody else. It was easy for me to relate my being unhappy to the two of them, because death is supposed to be sad. That's how easy it was for me to continually talk about them because it was easy to relate my state of upheaval to the upheaval their deaths caused for a lot of people.
That's why I feel alright about letting their memories go somewhat. I think they would have wanted me to say I can smile on my own without any prompting. They did their jobs, they got me to where I needed to be. Rather than continue to let the memories be a constant source of pain for me, I'm letting go of those memories.
The only memories I'm keeping are the ones that make me smile when I think of them. And those kinds of memories you never have to revisit that often... because those are the kinds of memories that do last a lifetime, maybe hopefully forever.
Yours Swimmingly,
mojo shivers
This time of year is always difficult for me. Aside from Breannie's birthday (twenty-ninth already?), the dates I recall the most from late April/early May is that April 20th is the anniversary of Columbine and May 14th is the anniversary of Jennifer's passing. They were both significant events in my life, the former for philosophical reasons and the latter for personal reasons, and they both continue to have a profound effect I believe on how I turned out. Not a year goes by that I don't know exactly what day it is when the 20th and 14th roll around. I might forget my parents' birthdays year after year. I might forget what month Mother's Day and Father's Day fall in every year. I might forget exactly how old my car is. But I never forget what happened on those two days.It's just every other day of the year that the memories are starting to dim.
I remember riding up to DeAnn's house on the day of April 20th, 1999. We were supposed to have spent the day together doing what we usually did, catching a movie followed by going out to dinner. Even then I intentionally had broken the car antenna off my car so when I arrived at the house what had happened had caught me completely by surprise. It had maybe been into its second hour by the time I had sat down in front of the television with her and the rest of her family.
I remember watching the whole thing rather detached because, up until that time, no one had ever covered a prolonged shooting/hostage situation in a high school before. Maybe they had--who knows--but I had never been in a position to watch the whole thing from an adult perspective. I felt it more, more than I would have had I still been at La Salle watching the coverage in some classroom. I think it affected me so much because a) I had a friend still in high school and b) the news reports kept coming back to the fact that this wasn't some spur-of-the-moment incident. The suspects had come in well-equipped and seemed to be adhering to some thought-out plan of action. I'd seen random violence perpetrated by teens before. Hell, I'd even taken part in some myself, but I had never seen people that young so calculatedly evil. I had never borne witness to that level of nefariousness.
A few weeks later I hit upon the angle that would be the touchstone that would make Columbine one of my all-time defining moments: Rachel Joy Scott. Here was a girl, only slightly older than my closest friend, and a devout Christian to boot. If she could be gunned down like that then no one was really safe. I mean--I knew children died all the time around the world and I knew that a lot of good people get killed every day as well, but Rachel was the first story where I had the opportunity to read first-hand how good she was. When Rachel's Tears came out and I could read first-hand what she was all about, what she was thinking, and what she had planned for her future it became conclusive that she was one of the good ones, and that she didn't deserve to die. Unlike people I thought I knew at the time, the fact she had recorded some of these deeper thoughts on paper and shared some of them with other people, it was far easier to see the light she had which many others don't possess.
That's when I started thinking about what it meant to live a good life and leaving a cherished legacy behind when you died. After reading her first book and the subsequent ones I started to contemplate that due to my deistic beliefs I couldn't afford to continue to live the life I was leading. If my few years on Earth were all I had to prove my worth then I couldn't waste time dicking around. I guess Rachel's death, because she was so young and because she was so good-hearted, became the catalyst to turning my life around, however small that turn might be. It wasn't because I was seeking to emulate her fame. It wasn't like I was thinking if I become a saint I might get a book deal too. It wasn't because I thought I had any chance of becoming as pious as her. I started simply realizing that any one of us might die at any moment and that it's better to be remembered for all the constructive things you did than for all the destructive things you did.
I began coming to the conclusion the path I was headed down--what with being physically violent, rather standoffish, and almost unfeeling when it came to most of my friends and family--was a very destructive one. If I had died at that point in my life there would have been nothing to show for my life except the wreckage it left behind.
Almost from the very day I finished Rachel's Tears I became a different person. I wouldn't say a totally good person, but I definitely became a better person, someone I at least could live with being remembered as. At the heart of it was trying to do honor to Rachel's memory and to the rest of the kids who died on that day. In those first few years I would invoke her name at the drop of a hat. I would recount anecdotes from her books, I would quote ceaselessly, and I would profess my admiration for her to anyone who would listen. She and the work she did with her time became a central philosophy for my own life.
It was the same when Jennifer died. She too was a good person and she too died far too young. Indeed, it was a reaffirmation of my basic principle that I needed to turn my life around when she died. Rather than being somebody I had read up on and studied from the news and the internet, she was a life-and-breath person I had gone to lunch with countless times, I had probably had a thousand conversations with, and had kind of gotten used to the idea of being friends with for decades to come. You could say when she died in 2003 I became refocused to take her place in the world.
She never wrote any books.
She never became a small celebrity.
But her death was just as bone-jarring as Rachel's had been and a thousand times moreso because I had seen her somewhat in the end. I became obsessed with the idea that I needed to take her place in the world. Like Rachel, she was far too decent of a person to have been called away, and I had crazy thoughts of how much damage her not being in the world was doing to it. It's almost like she had left a huge hole in the way the world was supposed to turn out and somebody, namely me, had to fill it in as best as they could. I didn't cause her death, but it almost became my quest to be the one good result of her dying. I wanted to make the rest of my life a tribute to her words and deeds that she had taught me in our time together, I wanted to make that my gift to her.
I spent a number of years trying to live up to that ideal.
ruby's fading out, she disappears
it's time, time to say goodbye
----
However, now that it's 2009, now that it's almost the tenth anniversary of Columbine, now that it's almost the sixth anniversary of my friend's fading away, I'm struck with the thought that I'm not as obsessed with keeping their memory alive as I had been. Coming up with an idea for this piece was as surprising as anything that's happened to me recently. I realized that it had been almost a whole year since I'd even thought about Rachel and two years since I last read anything by her. I realized that aside from the occasional posts I place here about Jennifer, I don't really spend my days trying to do what she would have done. I mean--I still think I try to live up to the ideals their deaths set for me, but I realized I don't spend nearly enough time thinking about them, about their lives.
It's a funny thing, memories. There was a time where I would think about either one of them twenty times in a day, when I would say their name a hundred times, or when I would reminisce with someone about them at least once or twice a week. Now all of that has come to a complete halt. It isn't because I stopped idolizing them as much; I still carry as much admiration for them as the day they died. It isn't because I stopped thinking they were important to me; they will always be some of the most important people I've gotten to know. And it isn't because I stopped believing in what they had to stay; trust me, I still believe.
What I think has happened is that the wounds aren't fresh any more, the sadness and sorrow from their tragic ends has all but dried up.
Honestly, all that I feel now about them is how much they've made my life better. When they first died, when it first happened, the bitterness and the angst were what drove me to reflect on them so much. It's easy to slide down that sadness spiral, where the more you think about disheartening events, the more you talk about it. And the more you talk about it, the more you think about it. It's different when a person's memory makes you happy. There's only one all-purpose state of happiness and you don't need a continual cause to be happy. The initial spark is usually enough.
The truth is their dying set me on a course that's led to some great things in my life. I fully attribute my getting the hell out of Sierra Madre, the sense of independence and freedom I know have, and the upturn in people I can count on and trust to the two of them. They've made my life several degrees more fulfilling. And for that I can't thank them enough. I'm not saying I never get sad. I'm saying, even when I do, because of what they taught me it's never as bad as it was before and it never lasts for as long as it did back then.
Unlike a sadness spiral, thinking about their contributions to my life do not cause me to recite them to everyone I meet any more. It's like my happiness, though caused in part by them, is my own. I don't give them credit for that as much as I might have once had. I think that's the point of happiness; that you feel in control of it, that you feel like you're more or less responsible for maintaining it. Sadness is easy to pin on somebody else. It was easy for me to relate my being unhappy to the two of them, because death is supposed to be sad. That's how easy it was for me to continually talk about them because it was easy to relate my state of upheaval to the upheaval their deaths caused for a lot of people.
That's why I feel alright about letting their memories go somewhat. I think they would have wanted me to say I can smile on my own without any prompting. They did their jobs, they got me to where I needed to be. Rather than continue to let the memories be a constant source of pain for me, I'm letting go of those memories.
The only memories I'm keeping are the ones that make me smile when I think of them. And those kinds of memories you never have to revisit that often... because those are the kinds of memories that do last a lifetime, maybe hopefully forever.
Yours Swimmingly,
mojo shivers
Labels: Columbine, fading, forgetting, Goodbyes, Jennifer, Memory, Rachel Joy Scott, Rancid
posted by mojo shivers @ 11:50 PM
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