Requiescat (et Vivet) in Pacem
In my alumi magazine that came today, there was a sad obituary for a woman from the class of 2000 who had died in January. The last sentence in the article indicated that her 22 month old daughter had died the same day. The list of grieving relatives did not include her husband, so I decided to look online and see if I could find out what happened. It turned out that she and her baby were the wife and child that were killed by a crazy British man who then fled back to England. After I read the first article about it, the whole story came back to me, and I remembered how crazy it was. I remembered it mostly because whenever I see a story like that, I always spend a few horrible minutes imagining what it must have been like for a mother to be there when her child was killed. This guy’s exploits have been grist for Nancy Grace and Greta van whatever and so I will not go into the details here. Still, once I found out she had gone to my college, I suddenly felt as if I knew her a little bit, or at least had probably known someone just like her when I was at school.
Unfortunately, she was not the first person from my college to be murdered since I graduated. I think 9 alums were killed on September 11, including a woman from my class that I did not know and a guy the year behind me who I knew and had shared beers with, although we were not in touch after college. A drop-out from my class was killed by a drug dealer in Florida, which was quite shocking (although it probably shouldn’t have been) considering I went to a small Catholic college. The worst thing that happened to someone that I met in college involved a guy named Nelson who was a year ahead of me that I had met when I was a freshman. I didn’t really know him, and after my first year I never spent any time with him again. He graduated, and then at his own graduation party he was stabbed to death by a childhood friend who had just had some sort of psychic break and murdered his own mother. I received this news when I got back to campus for my senior year, but I was not really able to wrap my head around this sort of information at the time, because I only knew a few people who had died at that point, and all of them had been sick.
Unfortunately having a spouse deployed gives you lots of time to think about people dying and all of the different ways it could happen. My husband always gives me a cleaned up version of what’s happening in Afghanistan, but the night that he spent hours in a bunker after a rocket attack on the US Embassy, he asked me what I had heard or seen about it. I don’t see much news, mainly because I don’t want the kids to see anything that will upset them, so I searched the Washington Post after I hung up. The “massive explosion” from the “rocket attack” merited three lines in the Post. Unfortunately for my husband and everyone else in the bunkers over there, Tom Cruise had a baby that day, so the column inches were needed for news that people really wanted to hear.
In addition to having a husband deployed, we know many other people - some friends, some acquaintances - that are also deployed or soon to deploy. I don’t like to think about the day to day danger they all face because it is too paralyzing. I like to pretend we’ve got everything under control and the bad guys on the run, much as the president would like me to, but every now and then I get a little wake up call that things aren’t going as well as we’d all like. Yesterday I got an e-mail from a friend I made in Kentucky, informing everyone that her husband’s humvee had been hit by an IED. He survived with a concussion, but two others he was with were killed and a third had head injuries. When I went online to find out if this accident had been reported, I found an article about one of the guys who had been killed, Spc. Scott M. Bandhold. He had worked at Disney World and on cruise ships as an entertainer, and at a casino in Portugal. He was inspired to enlist after September 11, when he was 34, so he was a little older than most of the soldiers over there, but I am sure his experience was the same.
I’m sure the moment of death for anyone in a trauma is surreal, but lately I seem to be thinking about it all the time. I think watching that movie Grizzly Man was what kicked off these latest ponderings for me. Actually, I could only watch parts of it since the Grizzly Man made me cringe so much because he seemed so out of touch with reality. The movie is a documentary about a guy who goes to live with the bears and seems to think they love him. At the end of the movie he and his girlfriend get eaten by a bear, and I immediately began to think how in the midst of the horror of undergoing such a violent and ghastly death, he must have had a moment where it all seemed too crazy to be true. He had been an aspiring actor living in Hollywood and supposedly almost getting the role of Woody on Cheers, and here he was being eaten by a bear.
All of the westerners who have been taken hostage in Iraq must have similar moments. The one I puzzle over most was Nick Berg, a guy from Pennsylvania who was 26 and went to Iraq as businessman looking for work. He hadn’t spent much time in the Middle East, and I imagine him to be a Philly guy similar to my husband and his friends. Added to the shock and terror of being murdered must have been some measure of bewilderment that he was in a place so far from what he knew, being subjected to a death that most of us imagine we will only see in movies like Braveheart or Gladiator.
One summer when I was buying sunscreen at the Happy Harry’s pharmacy near my parents’ house, I saw a newspaper article taped to the counter next to a donation jar. The donations were needed for the family of two women who were crushed when a dump truck was trying to make a sharp turn and tipped over onto their car, crushing them. The accident took place outside Bootsie’s Barbecue, a place down the street from my parents where we bought dinner a couple times every summer. I had never heard of the accident, and neither had my parents, but it seemed especially sad to me, because they probably never saw it coming. The roof probably started caving in on them and before they could figure out what was happening they were gone. This seemed like a freak accident to me, until a few weeks ago when I was driving with my kids to my sister’s house. We were headed through the center of bustling Pittsville, Maryland, and I was a little distracted by the sign that my sister and her husband had hung on the building where they will soon be opening a new restaurant. When my eyes returned to the road, I saw a dump truck careening toward me up on two wheels. I swung my car way out to the right, certain that some part of the truck or whatever was inside it was about to come bouncing through my windshield or down onto my roof. Fortunately, somehow the truck managed to right itself and sped away, leaving me a shivering mess on the side of the road. Unlike so many people, I had actually had a chance to consider this manner of death, since I had read about the other two women. But that didn’t make the moments of uncertainty any less traumatic or make me any more prepared for what could have happened.
Spc. Bandhold was a guy who a few years ago was working at a casino in Portugal and going home every night to his wife and kids, and suddenly he was a guy facing explosion in the desert. Every other soldier there must have a similar story, and be living a life that he/she couldn’t have imagined just a few years ago. Even as I sit in the safety of our home, the potential disasters, diseases, and attackers are lurking out there. I wish we could all be like the guy in the movie Big Fish, and declare “This is not how I go” to stop the unthinkable from happening. However, I guess the only thing I can do now is ignore the potential for death and go on with life. And I will take some comfort in the fact that the odds are pretty good now that a dump truck will not come close to tipping over on me again.
(My apologies to Sister Petra if the Latin is wrong.)
Unfortunately, she was not the first person from my college to be murdered since I graduated. I think 9 alums were killed on September 11, including a woman from my class that I did not know and a guy the year behind me who I knew and had shared beers with, although we were not in touch after college. A drop-out from my class was killed by a drug dealer in Florida, which was quite shocking (although it probably shouldn’t have been) considering I went to a small Catholic college. The worst thing that happened to someone that I met in college involved a guy named Nelson who was a year ahead of me that I had met when I was a freshman. I didn’t really know him, and after my first year I never spent any time with him again. He graduated, and then at his own graduation party he was stabbed to death by a childhood friend who had just had some sort of psychic break and murdered his own mother. I received this news when I got back to campus for my senior year, but I was not really able to wrap my head around this sort of information at the time, because I only knew a few people who had died at that point, and all of them had been sick.
Unfortunately having a spouse deployed gives you lots of time to think about people dying and all of the different ways it could happen. My husband always gives me a cleaned up version of what’s happening in Afghanistan, but the night that he spent hours in a bunker after a rocket attack on the US Embassy, he asked me what I had heard or seen about it. I don’t see much news, mainly because I don’t want the kids to see anything that will upset them, so I searched the Washington Post after I hung up. The “massive explosion” from the “rocket attack” merited three lines in the Post. Unfortunately for my husband and everyone else in the bunkers over there, Tom Cruise had a baby that day, so the column inches were needed for news that people really wanted to hear.
In addition to having a husband deployed, we know many other people - some friends, some acquaintances - that are also deployed or soon to deploy. I don’t like to think about the day to day danger they all face because it is too paralyzing. I like to pretend we’ve got everything under control and the bad guys on the run, much as the president would like me to, but every now and then I get a little wake up call that things aren’t going as well as we’d all like. Yesterday I got an e-mail from a friend I made in Kentucky, informing everyone that her husband’s humvee had been hit by an IED. He survived with a concussion, but two others he was with were killed and a third had head injuries. When I went online to find out if this accident had been reported, I found an article about one of the guys who had been killed, Spc. Scott M. Bandhold. He had worked at Disney World and on cruise ships as an entertainer, and at a casino in Portugal. He was inspired to enlist after September 11, when he was 34, so he was a little older than most of the soldiers over there, but I am sure his experience was the same.
I’m sure the moment of death for anyone in a trauma is surreal, but lately I seem to be thinking about it all the time. I think watching that movie Grizzly Man was what kicked off these latest ponderings for me. Actually, I could only watch parts of it since the Grizzly Man made me cringe so much because he seemed so out of touch with reality. The movie is a documentary about a guy who goes to live with the bears and seems to think they love him. At the end of the movie he and his girlfriend get eaten by a bear, and I immediately began to think how in the midst of the horror of undergoing such a violent and ghastly death, he must have had a moment where it all seemed too crazy to be true. He had been an aspiring actor living in Hollywood and supposedly almost getting the role of Woody on Cheers, and here he was being eaten by a bear.
All of the westerners who have been taken hostage in Iraq must have similar moments. The one I puzzle over most was Nick Berg, a guy from Pennsylvania who was 26 and went to Iraq as businessman looking for work. He hadn’t spent much time in the Middle East, and I imagine him to be a Philly guy similar to my husband and his friends. Added to the shock and terror of being murdered must have been some measure of bewilderment that he was in a place so far from what he knew, being subjected to a death that most of us imagine we will only see in movies like Braveheart or Gladiator.
One summer when I was buying sunscreen at the Happy Harry’s pharmacy near my parents’ house, I saw a newspaper article taped to the counter next to a donation jar. The donations were needed for the family of two women who were crushed when a dump truck was trying to make a sharp turn and tipped over onto their car, crushing them. The accident took place outside Bootsie’s Barbecue, a place down the street from my parents where we bought dinner a couple times every summer. I had never heard of the accident, and neither had my parents, but it seemed especially sad to me, because they probably never saw it coming. The roof probably started caving in on them and before they could figure out what was happening they were gone. This seemed like a freak accident to me, until a few weeks ago when I was driving with my kids to my sister’s house. We were headed through the center of bustling Pittsville, Maryland, and I was a little distracted by the sign that my sister and her husband had hung on the building where they will soon be opening a new restaurant. When my eyes returned to the road, I saw a dump truck careening toward me up on two wheels. I swung my car way out to the right, certain that some part of the truck or whatever was inside it was about to come bouncing through my windshield or down onto my roof. Fortunately, somehow the truck managed to right itself and sped away, leaving me a shivering mess on the side of the road. Unlike so many people, I had actually had a chance to consider this manner of death, since I had read about the other two women. But that didn’t make the moments of uncertainty any less traumatic or make me any more prepared for what could have happened.
Spc. Bandhold was a guy who a few years ago was working at a casino in Portugal and going home every night to his wife and kids, and suddenly he was a guy facing explosion in the desert. Every other soldier there must have a similar story, and be living a life that he/she couldn’t have imagined just a few years ago. Even as I sit in the safety of our home, the potential disasters, diseases, and attackers are lurking out there. I wish we could all be like the guy in the movie Big Fish, and declare “This is not how I go” to stop the unthinkable from happening. However, I guess the only thing I can do now is ignore the potential for death and go on with life. And I will take some comfort in the fact that the odds are pretty good now that a dump truck will not come close to tipping over on me again.
(My apologies to Sister Petra if the Latin is wrong.)
posted by Shannon at 10:24 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home