This is an essay I've written for my writing class. I want to share it, so...here it is.
***
Natalie is dead. Now Maggie has buried both her children. It is completely unreal, completely vague and fuzzy, but Natalie is abruptly gone.
My mother came into my room at eight the morning after it had happened. "Maggie's daughter died last night in a car crash," she said.
Sitting up, I think I just stared at her. I think I said "Oh my God," but I really can't be sure. In that moment, as I sat up, as I may have murmured a few words, I thought of the first and only time I met Natalie.
She had crossed the sidewalk under a dry, hot sun in a white tank top with one of her close friends in tow, just as friendly as could be. She showed me her peace-sign tattoo because she knew that I wanted a tattoo as well, and because she knew that I am a hippie and love to don peace signs at every opportunity. She was acting like we'd been friends for years, like we just hadn't seen each other in a while. I hoping to meet up with her sometime, to really be friends with her. Now, this is beyond the realm of possibility.
I barely knew her. I had met her only this once and seen pictures of her a couple of times. I know her mother, though. I've met Maggie, my mother's best friend, many times and I know how many people she has seen buried in her life. This death - the death of her remaining daughter - was something I could not and still cannot imagine surviving after all the other ones.
In her home Maggie has a portrait of Natalie hanging in the living room. She is laying on her stomach in the grass, her feet kicked up behind her, her arms folded on the ground before her, her smiling face tilted towards the camera with her long, red hair falling and shimmering over her shoulders. She was thinner in the picture than the day I met her. It was taken when she was still in high school, still on the dance team. She looked like the sister in Six Feet Under. I can't remember her name now. I couldn't even remember Natalie's name for several hours.
I couldn't get back to sleep after my mom left. I sat in bed for a while, trying to process how such a sweet, kind girl, just a few years older than me, could have been taken in such a way. Next came trying to process how Maggie was going to survive yet another death.
The day went on, as it's tendency has always been to do, and I learned of the death's impact on others I know more intimately. A friend I met up with in Writing 121 had come upon the accident minutes after it's occurrence. Two of my friends worked with Natalie at Dairy Queen.
"I don't know what's going to happen at Dairy Queen," my friend Cienna said. Natalie was one of the most experienced employees there and the boss had taken ill or been injured or something to that extent.
Yet, Dairy Queen must carry on.
Climbing into bed that night it struck me that, once the initial shock has passed, Natalie's death seemed relatively distant in my mind. It only passed behind my eyes a couple more times, and now the day had already come and gone.
It strikes me as odd that the world doesn't stop for a moment when someone dies. After all, that someone was a loved one to someone else. That someone was filled with words to be said, things to be done. Natalie was a beloved daughter and friend to many. While I didn't know her intimately and I don't know the things that she had to say, the things that she planned on and dreamed of doing, I know that they were there. I know that she had things to say, for everyone has something to say. I know that she had places to go and things to accomplish, because everyone has somewhere to go, something to accomplish. I wish now more than ever I could have known what Natalie wanted to say, what she wanted to do, so that I could tell you and anyone else willing to listen for her, so that people would know. Now it's too late, and it's all gone. In just the blink of an eye. At the moment of death, upon the moment of impact, all that was held within Natalie, within any victim of death, which is ultimately every one of us, vanishes completely. How is it that the world doesn't stop spinning at that loss, even for just a second?
Well, I guess the only rational explanation is that if the world stopped spinning for every death, it would never have time to move at all.
