Strongly Worded

Black Ice

I am a new driver and have no experience with winter driving (as you may know if you read my post about the de-icer). Until today, I have never driven in snow. But it was seriously snowing this morning, and I decided to drive regardless. I got in the car, and as I swung the door closed, I noticed a patch of black ice beneath it.

That ice brought back a fleet of memories. Almost exactly last year, I visited my beloved friend Ina in California, because I needed some love and sunshine. I was deeply depressed at the time, and needed to escape the New England cold, the gnawing loneliness, the sense that the coming months would hold only stress and strife. I was running out of faith. Things had sucked for so long that it was hard to remember when they hadn’t, or that someday they wouldn’t. I wanted to rollerblade on a boardwalk, hug my best friend, and take strength from her love. I wanted to eat fresh food and buy beautiful clothes and share her sunny world, just for a week.

On the third day of my visit, we learned that Ina's college friend Kate and her mother had been killed in a car wreck. They were on their way to a holiday party in their hometown of Portland. I have never met Kate or her mother, but I can imagine them, dressed in velvet, their hair brushed, smelling faintly of blush, of perfume. I imagine the chains on the tires, the fog on the windows. The car a shell of warmth and chatter.

And then the black ice. The whirling screeching catastrophe. And silence on the road, the snow dusting a motionless car.

Ina and I talked about whether the hostess of the party noticed their absence. We wondered who was driving. We asked questions and speculated, attempting to make sense of the senseless.

In the following days, the response to the tragedy—the mobilization of love—astonished me. Kate's high school friends emailed all the people in her life about the funeral arrangements. They came to the airport in shifts to greet mourners and drive them to the service. Kate's college community made frantic travel plans. A Portland family turned over their home to the eleven women gathered in grief.

<>I thought about what I would do if, G-d forbid, one of my college or high school friends was killed. Would it occur to me to contact her friends from other life phases? Would it occur to me to pick them up at the airport?

Then I thought, what if I died? Who would come to my funeral? How would people know who to call, how to get in touch with all the different realms of people I know? I had thought about setting up a contingency plan "just in case." I could give my parents my email password so they could send a mass email out in case I die, and set up an auto-reply message--so people trying to contact me would know that I was not flaky, but dead.

I was strangely jealous of Kate--of this rush of love, of her instant sainthood, the foundation established in her name. I was so depressed at the time that I even envied her release from the dreary business of living.

Now, ice reminds of her, of then, of what I now consider the precious privilege of living.

Sleet is in the forecast tomorrow. I'll be taking the bus to work.

Posted by Dori at 10:36 PM