End of An Era

Being as how, honestly, all I do is sit around and think lately, I've naturally been pondering my grief, given recent events. In the past two days I have reconnected with people I haven't seen since graduation day, 2003. The faces are all the same, although the behaviors are markedly more adult, and of course the circumstances demanded the utmost of respect. I'd always kind of wondered what a class reunion would really be like. Would anyone care that I was there? Would I care about anyone else? It turns out that none of that matters, and despite what you may or may not have thought about someone five years ago, seeing a face you saw 180 days a year for four years again after such a long time is a comforting feeling, even if we wished it could have been for better reasons.

But that is neither here nor there, and it's not the intention of this post. Instead I've been thinking about why I've been so much more grief stricken about Katie's passing than I had expected I'd be when I heard the news. We were friends, sure, but in a class of 67 kids, how couldn't you be? But we were far from best friends, even being close friends I think is a stretch. Nonetheless, we hadn't spoken to one another since I left her graduation party on graduation day. So why, then, would her passing rock me, and everyone else in our class regardless of our relationship with Katie, to our cores?

The best I can come up with is that this is a moment where we have all collectively realized that an era has ended.

The carefree college years are over and life is fully underway, and while we like to look at each other and remark on how young we all are still, just 22 or 23 years old, after all, we aren't getting any younger, either.

This is an "ah-ha" moment for some of us, myself included - a sort of loss-of-innocence moment where we realize that we are just mortals on a world stage headed toward entropy, and our time spent in the process is so very short. When Katie died she took with her our sense of indefatigable bravado, and in such a manner that only the most inane of fools could possibly have failed to grasp.

If you wrote a novel about our class, in the style of all the great works, from Hamlet to Catcher in the Rye, this would be that scene where the reader feels most vulnerable - literally the exact sentence where the innocent character loses the end game. You have Holden Caufield crying for Phoebe, Elwin's return from the war, Finny's second fall down the marble steps, Simon ascending the mountain and going insane. There's that brief realization that the Great Gatsby was shot dead this morning while reclining in his pool. For us, Katie dies at the age of 23, and in a way no one else could, reunites hundreds of people. It's a kind of poetry no author can really compose, and a reality no individual wishes for.

Perhaps some of us lament selfishly to some extent. I'm sure I probably have. All of the wonderful memories I have from high school now have a footnote. Katie invited me to hang out after the class of '02's senior play for no good reason...a few years before she passed away. Katie green-lighted Shane and mine's class play competition idea, despite the fact that she would be in Florida for it and could not be in it...that was about 6 years exactly before she was taken from us. They tell me Katie wanted to prosecute war criminals in the International Court of Justice, the only committee that Katie and I worked together as a team on after she agreed to join the Model UN...I guess I can take solice in that in some small way maybe I had an iota of a positive impact, that maybe at least once since we graduated my name may have popped into her head, but that's doubtful, I'm sure. I know I'll never forget when she walked with me through Quincy Market on the Bentley Model UN trip because I was running such a high grade fever I couldn't think straight, and then meeting me in the lobby the next morning to make sure that I survived the night all right. I think now the task now is not to erase the footnotes, not to go into a spiral of denial, but instead to use the footnotes to lend a whole new meaning and signficance to some of our fondest memories.

In the end I think we've lost more than just a wonderful person, we've lost that piece of ourselves we all so desperately need, that feeling that everything is still okay, and that no matter how much things change, they will always stay the same.

But you know what? They won't.



We know that now.