When I was a senior in high school, people kept dying. Students from my school died from accidental deaths, suicide, and even a heart attack. It started to feel like a common occurrence. These were people that we sat next to in class, ate lunch with, played sports with, and they were gone. Things got a lot harder, even smiling didn’t quite feel right anymore. There wouldn’t be another class period, lunchtime discussion, or ball game. I remember people in my classes joking about who would be next. Would it be a teacher? Would it be a senior? Would it be me?
It didn’t help that earlier that year stars such as Prince, David Bowie, Alan Rickman, Anton Yelchin (Who was then himself a young man), Gene Wilder, Carrie Fisher, Debbie Reynolds, and many more were reported dead. We had grown up consuming the art these people made, watching their movies, listening to their music, and reading their books. It especially didn’t help that it felt like we were hearing about a new school shooting every week. It felt like death was all we heard about anymore. It felt like the next words out of someone’s mouth would be news that another person has died.
I experienced the grief when a freshman boy who I worked behind the scenes of the musical with died while riding his skateboard. He had a heart condition. We all thought he was better. He wasn’t.
The next day, everyone who worked on the musical was called to the auditorium by the administration. They wanted to give us the opportunity to talk together and process what had happened. No one had anything to say. It was the next day, we didn’t know what to do. None of us could see the end of it besides just graduating and getting out of town. I couldn’t find the right words to rightfully convey my feelings. Words were so important to me, having always enjoyed writing. It felt that even if words came to mind, they couldn’t encompass what the people we lost deserved. There could be no right words, so why did it matter?
As a whole, the school was sorrowful. People that didn’t know those that we lost that year still felt it, still knew that we were missing community members, and still were saddened. I didn’t see people showing off their pain or publicly mourning. What I did see was more and more people started looking for a meaning. I remember watching the number of people in Younglife doubled, so much so they had to find a new place to hold meetings. I remember people in my psychology class asking deeper and deeper questions. I remember how we were just nicer to each other, and we checked in on each other. Not a lot of us really knew what to say about the people we lost, so we found things to do.
I was among those who looked for something else, something greater. Specifically, I was looking for something greater than my words. I really relied on them during this part of my life. I was not one to remain silent or not contribute to the greater dialogue. My written words were especially important to me, and I only found my mind blank. The saying may be “actions speak louder than words”, but I saw forming the words as my action, as my place and role in the world.
There’s no real happy ending to this story. Eventually, I graduated high school and moved on to a new community. Eventually, I put all of this out of my mind. But, sometimes I do think about the people we lost, and how each individual meant something. I think that we can find meaning in other people, not in how they think of us and interact with us, but in celebrating them and honoring their achievements and beliefs. We can take part of them and carry it within us, even if it is just their smile, or the time they asked how you were doing.
Recently, I’ve learned that it’s okay if you don’t always have the words to fully convey your feelings. Loss, grief, and trauma can be so debilitating to people that we lose sight of hope, much less how to communicate through words. Sometimes feelings don’t need a name to be validated, and don’t need a story behind them for those feelings to be real. It takes time to move on, to process, and to cope with our lives.
One of my friends died last year. She had been struggling with her mental health for a long time. Afterwards, I started looking for a more concrete way to honor her. I wanted to make something that would last. Eventually, I found that I could honor her through my creative writing. I could use words that had failed me for so long to honor her. She was a very artistically minded person, and I knew I could find the right words to capture my thoughts on her death in a way she would have enjoyed herself. I called it Hollywood Cemetery, after the famous cemetery in Richmond, Virginia, which she visited mere days before she died. To finish, I would like to share a short excerpt:
Within my heart, she walks with me.
Always and forever, here and now, eternally.
She is the smile that I cannot see.
- Lydia Manson, Junior TMT Research Assistant, Psychology & WRTC major