ON DEATH

The other morning I stepped into the street, my mind on something or other. I didn't see the moving van until it was honking at me, and the driver was yelling. Wouldn't that have been stupid: walking to work, gone. Just like that.

I've been thinking about death lately. If I had been killed crossing the street, it wouldn't have been particularly more unexpected than other deaths, except in being my own.

Last week I met my friend D. by chance, outside a bar, and we went inside for a beer. He's not doing well. Nearly ten years after a schoolmate of ours was shot, D. still can't watch movies with guns in them. Fireworks and backfiring cars still scare the shit out of him.

A writer friend tells me he's been dreaming about knives since his friend was stabbed by a stranger.

My college roommate tells me about her sister's fiancé. He drowned in a lake when their boat drifted away from them.

It's everywhere. All the time.

A friend of my sister's drowned, too, when they were swimming at the Jersey shore.

It's everywhere, and yet, it still comes as a surprise: What? Dead?

One boy I knew in high school drove off Pacific Highway 1, near Stinson Beach, where he'd lived all his life.

Another boy was run down by a drug-addled lunatic in Isla Vista when he was visiting a friend at UC Santa Barbara.

When someone dies we're reminded (again) that death is there, here. What is to be done with this knowledge? How does it effect the way we spend our days?

D. and I were sophomores in college when our friend G. was shot. A kid from my English class bought a cheap semi-automatic at a sporting-goods store in a medium sized town near our tiny rural college. The bullets he ordered through the mail. He started at the entrance of the school, on a December night when we were supposed to be studying for exams. He shot up the guard shack. Then he shot and killed a professor in his car, who was driving away from the library, where I had just checked a book out to him.

Two kids from my art class ran into the library to tell us that someone had had a car accident. I worried at the reference desk: should I leave my post? Who should I call? What should I do? And G. went outside to see if he could help the professor, dead in his car.

Then I thought it was strange that someone was lighting off firecrackers, or that hunters were shooting in the woods. At night? It sounded so close.

G. came back inside, clutching his chest, looking surprised as hell, "I've been shot in the chest," he said, and fell down in front of the reference desk.

Everything became confusing, and not real. 911 didn't work, for some reason. No one I called answered the phone. Some people called, and I told them that something very bad was happening. I waited for the kid with the gun to come in and kill us all. I thought of what I would say to him to make him change his mind. "You don't have to do this," I thought might work, if I looked into his eyes compassionately. I suspect that line comes from a movie or TV. I waited for G. to get up off the floor-"You really thought I was shot!" he would say, "Ha ha! Ketchup!"

We were crouched behind the reference desk, and behind the card catalogue, under the tables, in the listening room, in the boy's bathroom. Some of us ran out into the woods, and stayed there for hours. Waiting to be killed or saved got a bit boring, actually. I thought I might start laughing because the whole situation was so stupid, but I didn't want to upset the others, and I managed to keep myself in check. I crawled under the reference desk to feel for G.'s pulse; I suspect that what I felt was my own, beating in my fingers. I said something to him, but I've forgotten what it was--something inane, I'm sure--what do you say to someone who's bleeding on the carpet? Someone you cannot admit to yourself you know is dead? "Are you all right?" I think I may have said. G. was not all right.

When the EMTs finally came, they stepped over his body to get to the boy who'd caught a bullet in his leg. Surely a bullet in the chest is much more serious than a bullet in the leg, I thought. "Is he going to be okay?" I yelled at the EMTs. "Is he going to be okay?!" And when they ignored me a second time, what I must've known sort of, I knew really, and a loud howl came out of me.

This was in 1992, before "school shooting" was a term in the common lexicon. Our gunman was not compared to other troubled teens. He was an anomaly. I wondered what was going through his head as he walked through our campus—where everyone knew each other by sight, if not by name—shooting people. I still wonder.

The memory of that night doesn't hurt as sharply as it used to, though I'm still startled sometimes to see one of G.'s look-alikes on the street, or I'll forget, and find myself thinking, I wonder what G.'s up to these days.

He's not up to anything. He's gone. And I still don't know what to do with this knowledge, the fact of death.

The best I can come up with is: don't waste time.


§ § §


Rose Gowen lives in Boston. Her work has been published on-line in McSweeney's, Vestal Review, Linnaean Street, and is forthcoming in Pindeldyboz; in print, her work has appeared in The American Poetry Review and Literary Potpourri, and is forthcoming in Night Train and Snow Monkey.

She can be reached at: rosegowen@hotmail.com

Send the URL for this work to a friend!

GO TO NEXT PAGE