25ish years ago, I had a sweet, angelic friend from Russia whom I met in college. Nobody knows for sure why she hung herself from her bedsheet in her dorm room. We had guesses. Even today, thinking about her brings tears. Maybe more now that I know loss, catastrophic loss that rocks the world and leaves it shattered. At the time, I lived in a world wherein it couldn't happen to me. You can read below the reflections I recorded shortly after, in free verse poetic form.
Now that I lost my father-in-law, my closest brother, my four-month-old baby (all in the course of six months), and 15-16 miscarried babies, I know it CAN happen to me, to anyone. The idea that it can't happen to you is a false shield, an artificial wall to make those who sit behind it feel safe. There is no such thing as it can't happen to me. Anything at any time can happen to anyone. I try to make the moments count, so when those things do happen, I will have fewer regrets. I don't go to funerals if I can help it because I've wept through too many. And the memories and grief all come back when I have no choice but to go. I can mourn with those that mourn without making myself go there, relive it all.
I remember my innocence to loss then, what it was like to hide behind the false wall of it can't happen to me. I really didn't know how to mourn with those that mourn because I didn't know what mourning even meant. I didn't have empathy, only sympathy, pity. Now, I get it but wish I didn't, but loss has given me the empathy I never wanted. I still weep over the memories, but my personal ache for her loss is all but forgotten. Instead, I weep for those who still mourn her on a deeper level. So I relive it through this poem and remember that her family will have a chance to hold their daughter again, just as I will hold mine. There is hope for Victoria, victory over death. One day.
A Tree for Victoria
Flashing
lights and sirens
Whip past my peripheral vision
In the cold of the morning.
A premonition--
Brief, foreboding--
Charged through my mind
In free association with the
Ambulance:
Will
a friend ride away in that?
Will the banshee on wheels
Claim someone I know?
And just as quickly,
I scoffed the thought away, saying
No. Not likely.
My world doesn't turn like that.
I
arrived
At the dried-blood tinted
Dorm building,
And the premonition recurred.
No, not just recurred
But sent tremors through my mind
Shaking my universe.
The same red light
Flashed its way across
The building...
MY
building...
Making it bleed red light.
The
banshee siren
Echoed back
From its brick surface
In a tone of finality.
The cold, white ambulance
Pulled away
And I saw nothing
But the pale, ghostly faces
Of students staring through
A nearly impenetrable cloud
Of mourning-black exhaust.
The cold sting of the earlier premonition
Began to penetrate
The haze of impossibility.
I
walked through
The handful of strangers
Lining the street
And
into the building
That until that morning always felt
Safe.
I joined the silent tableau
Of friends, acquaintances
Embracing each other
Or just staring out into the out-of-place
Cheerful pink walls of the lobby.
The hollow gazes
Of united pain
Amplified my premonition into reality.
A
friend--
The one who hailed the ambulance,
And the one whose fate
I had feared for when I first saw the ambulance--
Met me to tell me of another.
She spoke the name of another friend,
the name of the corpse in the ambulance.
Victoria.
An
image of her smiling face,
gentle, always cheerful
With a halo of golden hair
Perpetually restrained by a headband
Swam into my mind.
Our lives hadn't overlapped
As much as they could have,
Should have.
We had shared
Once
Breakfast in the cafeteria,
Pancakes, sausage.
I recalled multiple scenes
Of clumsy tennis games
Laughingly played together.
We often stayed after, and struggled
To improve together, to no avail.
We always talked and laughed as we walked back.
No more than that.
I didn't know her well,
But I had thought I knew her well enough
Never to imagine...
Victoria? It couldn't be.
Not smiling
Angelic
Victoria.
But
the somber faces
Left no room for denial.
Her best friend had found her,
Dangling like a Christmas ornament
At the end
Of rope, painstakingly plaited
From the remains of a baby blue sheet.
A scream
Had split the early morning hours
When she was found.
The
weekend before,
Victoria had fallen downstairs
And had broken nothing.
Friends explained to me
Accepting bones relax,
And fall without resistance.
A body that tightens in fear of the fall
Shatters
Like a porcelain doll
When it hits.
Victoria had taken flight,
Embraced the fall,
Embraced death.
Her death wish saved her life.
Some wondered if this had been the source
Of her idea.
I
didn't hear until after.
Nor did I know
That her friends--
Her real friends--
Had been on watch.
Someone had suspected.
Flags always go up somewhere.
Why hadn't I known?
The cold facts remained:
Her
best friend had been the first on-site;
Two others cut her sheet
To pull her down,
One hoping she lived,
The other already knowing,
Recognizing the purple bloating
Of the features,
Permanent scars in the mind.
During
our last walk together
Along a path through the trees,
She had told me she struggled
With the language,
With her classes,
Mostly English papers.
I'd offered to help
To
put my major to use.
But she'd never asked,
And I'd never insisted.
Russia had been very different,
She told me.
Not at all like liberal Vassar.
Laws and rules
That had structured her reality,
Held her life in place--
Like her headband for her hair--
Had disappeared,
Leaving behind...vagueness,
A nebulous cloud of expectation.
But still, I had no idea.
Guilt that I hadn't known, done more
Weighed almost as much on my mind
As the shadow of sadness did on us all.
Later
gossip taught me things I
Never knew. Some things, I never
Wanted to know
About a cruel family
Who rebuffed Victoria's letters
Begging for an opportunity to go home,
And a crueler reception to meet those
Who returned to Russia as a failure in American schools--
Condemned to life in a factory
A gray existence.
But these were second-hand explanations,
No way to really know
If the real guilt fell
On the place
That taught her the rules of life
Or on the place that took those rules away
Or something else.
Suicides come in threes,
I heard.
So my other friends still weren't safe.
I didn't attend the ceremony,
Not a real funeral, since her body was shipped home
To Russia.
A remembering. An outpouring of love
From her closest friends.
I don't know for sure
Why I didn't go.
I told people I was busy, and really I was.
But that wasn't really it.
Perhaps I didn't feel like I belonged,
Didn't feel like I had earned the right
To be there.
But
I went to see the tree
They planted, several steps off the path,
The very path we had walked together.
Some said they hid the tree in embarrassment,
That she was lucky to get a tree at all
As a memorial for a suicide.
The plaque said nothing but a name and dates,
Dates too close together.
You'd only find it if you were looking
And only know why
Or at least guess
If you had been there,
Had known her.
The irony of her name,
Of my earlier premonition,
Of the whys and the theories
Of the unknown
Final reason that would drive
A person that far
That young
Plagued me,
Saddened me,
Made me fear for others
In that October gloom.
But
no one else
Followed her example.
We all remembered
How the suicide affected us,
Whether we knew her well or not--
Those who dropped out;
Those who couldn't walk her hall
Without remembering;
Her good friend who jumped drunkenly from the balcony
Thinking she could fly,
Like Victoria,
But instead broke both legs.
For
years, ghost stories
Will be told to frighten freshmen,
Stories of the girl who hung herself
By her own bed sheet.
But those of us who knew her
Will remember
Victoria's angelic face
And cherish life, hers and ours
Just a little more
Every time we see--
Or remember--
Her tree.
