LY #103 American Tragedies

Tragedy is ubiquitous.

"He maketh his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sendeth rain on the just and the unjust."  Matthew 5:45

Every human being will experience a deep loss.  Some experience many.  Some survive these losses and some don't. 

Every quarter I have students who choose or are driven to share a dark loss.  Just last week a young woman gave an evocative speech with a verbal portrait of her brother wrapped within the story of the hour of the day a Marine detail came to the door of her home with news of her his death in Afghanistan.  She told the story well, with foreshadowing and poetic use of parallel structures.  Her words were chosen for their sound and potency.  It was a poetically written tribute.

I don't know that I've ever asked a student, "Why did you choose to share this deep pain with us?"  I think I don't ask because I think I know.  I believe I know.   This is called "social projection:"  "the tendency to expect similarities between oneself and others."  In the past I felt driven, compelled to perform catharsis, compelled to share with teachers and other students (whether they wanted to hear or not) the stuff I was thinking. So I often assume that my students share their stories for the same reason -- because they can't not share them.
  
When I was an undergraduate, the two dark stories I needed to share were The Rape and The Family Tragedy.   The purpose of the memoirs written over the next few days (or however long it takes) is to revisit these darknesses and look at them in terms of what is now called "the healing process."   But I will only be able to talk about that process and about those events from my own point of view.  This position makes sense for the act of violence I personally experienced.  

But The Family Tragedy impacted many people other than myself.  They have stories too.   Yes, but it's not my place to tell those stories.  If anyone reading these pages is a family member or friend they are welcome to add their comments.

Certainly I have thought about the impact of The Family Tragedy on other family members.   If I am someday compelled by my muse or daemon to construct a fiction based on this time, I would try my best to speak as Others, if not the actual others (family and friends) who were involved in the fallout.  But when writing a supposedly true story, or at least true to me, I can speak for no one but myself.

No two people experience any event in exactly the same way.  No two children experience their parents in the same way.  No two people involved in a traumatic event experience it in the same way.

A member of Skyhooks, my poetry writing group, recently held a poetic conversation with a line from Robert Frost's A Servant to Servants, "the best way out is always through."  I assume there are many earlier sources for that thought, as well as it's zen'sque parallel, "the way out is the way in." 

This way to the egress.