After I heard about the murder of second-year criminology and criminal justice student Diamoney Greene, I thought about the ways you could talk about death on college campuses.
You could talk about the march of headlines (shooting after shooting after shooting,) which makes death seem almost normal.
Or maybe say that death is like a pair of headlights reflected in a rearview mirror: it’s always closer than it appears.
Or even touch on a lighter note: seeing the death of someone near us, of someone we knew (or could have known) should spur us to seize the day. Eat, drink, be merry. Find a purpose and live for it. All that stuff.
But, after some thought, none of these floaty and wholly conceptual ideas seemed like right way to think about the death of a Gamecock.
They don’t reflect the fact that a pair of eyes is shut to the universe forever. That every day since the Greene's death might have been the day she smiled at you across the street, had she lived. Or opened the door for you. Or helped you on your feet after slipping and falling in Russell House.
Every day could have been the day that Greene changed your life.
I don’t know if this is the right way to talk about death. No subject, except love, has been abstracted into pithy phrases as much as death.
What's needed here is a few facts to tie us back down to the real.
Right now, there are two parents without a daughter. An empty seat in a class. One less set of hands to put up a Christmas tree.
I never knew her. I don’t feel the chest-void that accompanies the death of a friend.
But I don't need to. It doesn’t make her absence from the people she loved any less true.
The only bit of the Talmud I remember from my Jewish upbringing goes something like this: “whoever destroys a single soul destroys the whole world.”
The day after a fellow Gamecock died, I heard the low hum of human conversation as I walked through campus, each person completely sure that death is distant and patient and slow.
It is as if they didn’t know how easily a world was destroyed this week.