[lit-ideas] Re: lit-ideas Digest V4 #275
- From: Eric Dean <ecdean99@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 3 Oct 2007 13:24:39 +0000
Andreas writes:
“…I wondered if our society has a sort of social amnesia; general society
remembers only the last few years (and only vaguely); the past slips away into
a fog.”
A little over five years ago, Sheri, the woman I loved and was expecting to
marry was brutally murdered by her ex-husband. He, homeless, unemployed and
alcoholic, had apparently come unexpectedly to her house before she left for
work to ask Sheri to let him have their daughter for the day. He stabbed Sheri
to death with a serrated bread knife from her kitchen and fled with their
six-year old daughter Rachel. He killed himself and Rachel the next morning in
an apparently suicidal head-on with a semi on a rural Iowa road.
I was, at the time, the Chief Information Officer for United Airlines and, in
that capacity, also the chair of a relatively newly-formed internet standards
body called the Liberty Alliance. On the day Sheri was murdered, I was in
Vancouver to convene the meeting of Liberty’s management board at which we were
to approve the first round of specifications. It was the pinnacle of my career
thus far. We had created the specifications in pretty much record time. As I
was, increasingly frantically, trying unsuccessfully to reach Sheri, I was also
being interviewed by the Economist, The New York Times and the Wall Street
Journal about the Alliance’s planned announcement the next week.
When I came back to work a couple weeks after the funeral, I had an odd
experience. My office was in the southwest corner of the fourth floor of one
of the two office buildings on United’s corporate headquarters campus in Elk
Grove Village, a suburb of Chicago. It is an old building now, built, I
believe, in the late ‘60’s or early ‘70’s. My office was enormous. It
occupied enough square footage for several of the cubicles which lined most of
the rest of the floor. The outer two walls were windows, almost floor to
ceiling. On that sunny mid-summer day when I returned, I stood at the window
looking out on the artificial pond at the center of the campus. It had struck
me, as I walked from the underground parking garage, a space in which was one
of the perks of my position as a senior officer, that Sheri’s death had faded
from awareness for just about everyone in the building. As I stood there, I
thought about how I was the only one who would always remember her death in
just the way I remembered it.
For a brief while my grief had been semi-public. Everyone who worked with me
at United had known about Sheri’s death and the thoughtful expressions of their
sympathy had been abundant. Her death and her ex-husband’s subsequent
suicide/murder had been front page news locally for a day or two. The eulogy I
gave at Sheri’s and Rachel’s funeral was quoted in the one or two newspapers
that covered her funeral. But then it all faded entirely from the news. I had
expected that. I had not really anticipated, though, the much more concrete,
immediate experience of that same fading which greeted me as I walked through
the building that morning on my way to my office. The people who knew me were
all gentle to me as I met them in the corridors that first day back. But of
course, in an enormous office like that, most of the people did not really know
me. I was alone with my grief, happy to be back at work but at the same time
lonely in my sorrow.
As I stood at the window, though, I felt how right that was. It was not only
inevitable but right that something so devastating in my life would not really
have a lasting effect on the lives of everyone else. That feeling had another
facet as well. The fading made it starkly clear that it was only in my heart,
in my memory, in my feelings that the reality of the particular person I had
loved could exist and by existing mark what had been so utterly destroyed in
her death.
It is very difficult to express that moment accurately. The passing time has
blurred the outlines of the experience. But even so it feels as clear to me
now as it did then. What seems impossible is to express the uniqueness of what
I felt. That shows the limits of my abilities as a writer, I suppose, but I
think it also reflects something about the nature of writing, even the nature
of words and language. Words can only express something shared. By expressing
something shared, something common, they may invite their recipient to attend
to something which is unique and not shared, but if it really is something
unique and not shared, then it cannot be the unique, unshared thing the writer
was inviting attention to. Perhaps the experience of having experiences that
cannot be shared may be something we have in common.
Standing at that window I felt quite clearly how real that inexpressible sense
of her was, how real the loss of that inexpressible sense was in her death, and
how it was only real because I was alive to experience it. The fading of the
brutal events of her death from the awareness of those around me provided the
background against which I could feel the reality of the inexpressible in its
inexpressible concreteness without having to find a place for it in the world.
Perhaps, then, to come back to Andreas’s musing, there is an important role
that such social amnesia plays. It provides a backdrop against which each of
us has the opportunity to recognize that which we each have and are and which
is simultaneously completely vulnerable – Sheri’s being was destroyed when she
was murdered – and eternally unique – there is not now and can never be anyone
else who is her. Without the silence which social amnesia provides, that
inexpressibly unique being gets swept up into the inevitably superficial din of
the public’s business.
My best regards to one and all,
Eric Dean
Leaving Phoenix and moving to Washington DC
Formerly in Chicago, IL
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