Katie Madigan 1
INQ 110 Other Places
Dr. Hanstedt
October 3, 2014
Bang, Bang
“This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper”
-“Hollow Men” T.S. Eliot
On average, the Earth spins at about 1,040 miles per hour. Pretty fast, right? Faster than a mile a minute. We don’t feel it and we don’t see it. For the most part, we’re barely even aware of it. A far as we know, it’s just a part of our every-day life. However, when the time comes that the world seems to come to a skidding halt is when we realize how fast we’re actually moving. It’s the moments like that which cause us to really look at the world for what it is; harsh and unforgiving. When we’re young, we look at the world with the black and white perspective. There’s good and there’s evil, and that’s life. It’s only when we grow up that we can register that life isn’t always as simple as black and white and good and evil. As cliché as it sounds, we live in a world full of shades of grey and accepting it is a part of growing up.
In David Sedaris’ mostly humorous travel article “Journey into the Night”, he touches on the importance of family and the reality that life isn’t always sunshine and rainbows. Throughout the whole story, he talks about what an ordeal it was to be seated next to an emotional Polish man, who’s “mother had just died” (Sedaris), on an international flight while sitting in luxurious business class. He goes on and on in hilarious detail about the “doted on passengers” (Sedaris) and how uncomfortable it was to be
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seated next to a grief stricken Polish man who’s “eyes were red and swollen from crying, and his nose, which was large and many-faceted, looked as if it had been carved from wood and not yet sanded smooth” (Sedaris); in other words, he was a mess. As Sedaris attempts to ignore the “grieving passenger” (Sedaris), he makes an interesting observation of the Polish man “overdoing it [the grief] a bit” (Sedaris) and then recalls his own childhood and the memory of a girl from his school who had died of Leukemia. He describes how after that incident, he and his friends “fell into a great show of mourning” (Sedaris). He knew it was foolish and immature but it didn’t matter, he and his friends “were people who knew people who died” (Sedaris). Yet as the piece goes one, the humor gets darker and darker until it isn’t funny at all anymore; it fades into something quite depressing. He remembers more cases of death in his life and how it was only when he grew up that he really began to understand the power of grief and sorrow.
While reading, I thought it was entertaining and I found myself laughing and recalling my own experiences with long flights and terrible seat neighbors, the story didn’t really ignite a spark in me… At first. It was only when Sedaris began recalling his childhood and the discovery of “real” grief that my perspective of his work changed dramatically. His sobering line of “the thought of my sisters and me, so young then and so untroubled” (Sedaris) is what really sealed the deal. His brutally honest reflection brought me back to my own family and hit me much harder than I expected.
I had normal upbringing for the most part. My parents both had stable jobs and were still happily married after nearly twenty years. My sisters and I were all involved in extracurricular activities like theatre, volley ball, soft ball and all while getting decent grades. Every week we would have Sunday dinners followed by family viewings of the latest episodes of The Walking Dead; life was simple and uncomplicated… Oh what I would give to go back to before. The world stopped turning and imploded at
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approximately 5:45 am of November 20th, 2013 when my father’s best friend shot his wife in her sleep and then himself. My family was devastated, life as we knew it was over.
To say that it was unexpected would be a dire understatement. When you hear of horrific tragedies, you feel sorry but they barely skim the surface of your radar. They do not even seem real, almost as if they’re fictionalized. But never in your wildest dreams do you imagine that they could become your life. The “monster” in this story was a man that I’d grown up around. His two daughters, seventeen and thirteen (only two days away from turning fourteen) at the time, were like sisters to me. His wife was my mother’s best friend. In many ways, he was family. They were family; and just like that, everything was shattered. The man I’d trusted my whole life had become a murderer and the woman I’d seen as a second mother had become a victim. This was not some nightmare, but rather a cold harsh reality.
The world wasn’t black and white anymore, just darker and darker shades of grey. I was seventeen years old and all semblance of youth and innocence evaporated within an hour. Being the oldest, I became the adult to my sisters while my parents were so distraught. I witnessed the five stages of grief right before my eyes and it was terrible. Almost pathetic, even. It wasn’t the “false grief” or “over exaggerated grief” which Sedaris mentions so eloquently in his piece. I didn’t ham it up at the funeral and I never pounded my fists against the pavement screaming “why them and not me?” (Sedaris). No, I watched my parents and sisters unravel at the seams while I desperately tried to be the stich that held them together. There was one moment when my dad came home from work that is forever branded vividly in my mind. It was a night or two after the incident and I knew he needed me to show a little more love than usual. I met him at the door and instead of being greeted with a “Hey Kate!” or “What’s going on, Schwadie?” I found him standing in the hallway just staring blankly at his
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phone. I tentatively approached him and gently asked if he was alright. He jerked his head up, almost as if my calm voice had startled him, his tired, bloodshot eyes locked with mine and after what felt like an eternity he wordlessly shook his head. Without a moment’s hesitation I reached up and engulfed him in a tight hug. It was like it was in slow motion, one second he was silent and melancholy and the next it was like I’d opened floodgates. There’s something surreal about having your father, the seemingly strongest man in your life, fall apart in your arms; nothing quite prepares you for it. Nothing prepared me for it. As he sobbed into my shoulder, staining my blue sweatshirt, I felt nothing but anger at the world. How dare someone cause my father that much pain, his best friend no less? To this day, I still ask myself that very question.
Sedaris was right about there being “an element of showmanship” (Sedaris) to grief. Although it wasn’t necessarily the case with me, I definitely noticed it all around. I saw it at the double funeral with women dramatically (but still gracefully) weeping into tissues and their husbands’ shoulders with that horrible musty smell of cleaning products and decay suffocating the air. I could hear it in the halls at school; people whispering about how if they had maybe done that one thing that one time, then maybe this horrible event could have been prevented. I heard and saw it all, and it made me furious! “How dare they?” I would think. They didn’t know what the actual sorrow felt like. They were merely playing the role of a grief stricken bystander, they didn’t actually care. It was the pretending and ignorance that infuriated me. I only cried once throughout the entire experience, and it was later on that night while I sat in my dad’s car; alone. They weren’t the silent, beautiful tears you would see in a movie, but they weren’t the wailing into the night type either. As I sat in my dad’s white Kia, I let the grief slam into me. Within seconds, I was taken over by full-body-shoulder-wracking sobs that shook me down to my core. And I couldn’t seem to stop. My breath came and went in short puffs, my throat felt constricted. Before
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I knew it, I was hyperventilating. It took me a while to calm down completely, almost twenty minutes. But once I had, it was like my emotions shut off. I became numb.
I never had, nor craved anyone to come up to and say “you look like you just lost your best friend” (Sedaris) or pull me close and whisper sweet nothings of happier days. I just wanted to be alone. Above all else, I just wanted to feel normal again. I was foolish, the mere thought of normal was no more than a pipe dream now. My world got turned upside down even further when the youngest daughter of our deceased family friends (my sister’s best friend), moved in with us. We all loved her, of course, and were happy to open our home. But just like everything else, reality stepped in and caused more problems. When going through an ordeal like losing your parents, one doesn’t just “bounce back”, so to speak. Since we were still hiking the mountain to normalcy, we were nearly oblivious to how bad the damage done to her really was. At first, we only noticed the “expected” things; nightmares, panic attacks, issues with being alone. You know, the typical signs that someone has gone through a trauma. The as the weeks dragged by, little by little, the subtle became obvious. We would be sitting at dinner and she would pick at her food and swirl it around the plate until she would leave and spend hours on end locked in the bathroom. Or sometimes she would stare into a crowded room (or an empty one for that matter) and be suddenly over taken with an expression so pale and terrified that one would think that she saw a ghost. Well, it didn’t take long before we put two and two together. We tried everything we could to help her, in the end she moved out and in with her extended family up north.
The world started turning again after a while, for everyone else at least. As always, life moved on. More “interesting” things happened and people forgot about the tragedy. I wish that it could have been that simple for my family; that we could have just “moved on” with everyone else. Sedaris makes a point in his piece almost as a follow up to the girl in his class who’d died, that when he was much older
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a close friend had died and what his grief felt like after that. In some ways, it’s a bit ironic. A girl he knew had died and his grief was an exaggerated show and then years later when someone he was actually close with had passed, he wasn’t sure how to react. Before the incident, I had a similar attitude towards death. Sure, it was sad and I felt sympathy for those suffering, but I never experienced any real pain. Like Sedaris, I have lived now and I have seen how cruel and dark the world can really be. It’s almost been a year and there isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t think about it, about them and the tragedy. It’s a part of me, a part of my family, now. The blow has faded slightly as time has gone by and it’s gotten easier. We’re finding our way back to normal, little by little. I haven’t spoken to the daughter since she moved away months ago, although I write to her all the time.
Maybe one day I’ll get a letter back.