Last November, the night before driving back to Duke after Thanksgiving break, my phone rang. Planning to leave by five the next morning, I snapped when I answered it and tersely asked whoever it was to please call me back in the morning; I'd have plenty of time to chat on the road. I didn't realize from the caller's voice that what she had to tell me couldn't wait - our friend Maggie had been hit by a drunk driver and was in a coma. She asked me to think of Maggie and shoot her some uplifting e-mails in the morning, for her to read when she woke up.
As most here know, she never did. Her friends at Duke and at the Marine Lab, where she'd been studying, knew that if anyone could have survived such a massive trauma it would have been her, with her level of fitness and positivity of spirit, and we convinced ourselves that the karma she'd built over the years could save her. Maggie lasted through the end of classes, but on the morning after Durham's ice storm, when most of West was having an impromptu winter carnival on the quad, she passed away.
A bit over a month later, with remembrances printed in this paper and memorials at Beaufort and the Chapel over and done, I'm left with her e-mail in my online addressbook and memories enough, but I'm also left with something a bit less tangible and much less fuzzy. I'm left with anger.
It's an anger that I can't direct or properly describe. It's not because I don't know why I have it or because I've pent up my grief and refuse to share my feelings, or because I don't understand or accept that sometimes, contrary to popular belief, things don't happen for a reason but just occur. Look at the four Yale students killed by an errant tractor trailer last week - like Maggie, these were smart kids with bright futures, cut out of life for no real reason. When I look at statistics regarding automobile death and especially automobile death involving alcohol, I find it difficult to believe that everyone I know hasn't died in a car.
Maybe if a butterfly had flapped its wings in the Amazon - if the weather had been clearer, if the other car had lingered at a rest stop - things could have been different. I've accepted that it didn't - in Alice Sebold's "The Lovely Bones," an "intake counselor" in heaven tells her newest charge to let go of the what-ifs with a curt "get over it," and I consider it sound advice. Perhaps what I've realized most is that this sort of thing happens all the time.
I've accepted Maggie's death. I haven't accepted the driver who killed her.
I don't know his name, where he lives, what he looks like, or even, come to think of it, that he's a he. I do know that the strength of my hatred is probably a dishonor to his victim, who was so willing to look at people's strengths. So over break, in an attempt to follow the example Maggie left behind, I tried to stop hating him. At home in my living room, when things would wind down and I was left with enough quiet to meditate on death, I started doing research. His name, the specific kind of car he drove, what he's been charged with. They tell us that the Internet is a scary place, the way you can find things out, and I wanted very much for it to be true. I didn't know why I exactly wanted the knowledge. I might be from New Jersey, but I don't have any mobsters in my pocket that I could send to pick him off - I just didn't want him to be anonymous, to have a "white male, driving a pick-up" definition to hide behind. I didn't want to run into him someday and not know what he'd done.
Did my determined flipping through webpages mark some sort of obsession, an unhealthy desire to immerse myself in morbid information? I don't think so. I began looking so that I could let go, but my quest makes me question our views on protection and privacy, and how the way we use them reflects our values.
Why, for instance, do we keep the names of sexual assault victims under such wraps? We consider sexual assault an ultimate invasion of privacy and don't want to display the victim's invasion further; this I understand. There's also the depressing truth that disclosure of the victim's identity puts her or him at more risk. But by encouraging that sort of silence, we perpetuate the idea that sexual assault victims need to carry a burden of shame, because silence, to me, connotes guilt, or at least something to hide. We might have the Fifth Amendment to protect us, but anyone who takes it all but shouts their criminal complicity from the eaves. We're about to go to war over Saddam's silence about his supposed warheads. This is a country that values openness to the extreme.
In a way I appreciate the silence that surrounds that sloppy-drunk driver, because it tells us that he isn't worth dealing with outside of his drunk-driver label. I'm beginning to realize that I don't want to know his name or whether he has kids or if he takes good care of his dog. I don't really want him to be human. And as long as I keep him shrouded, he's not.
Meghan Valerio is a Trinity junior and arts editor of Recess. Her column appears every third Tuesday.
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