My sister Allison’s friend and sometime tennis doubles partner, Elena Cadet, was killed this weekend in a car accident. She was 18, a freshman at UC Riverside. I never met Elena, but I hear she was incredibly sweet and sunny, a tennis player admired both for athleticism and attitude. Over the past few days her Facebook Wall has swelled with tributes and loving messages from her many friends, a touching cyber-version of the impromptu outpourings of notes, flowers, and mementos that usually adorn more physical memorial sites (and I’m sure all these now decorate that palm tree near Riverside).
In spite of my not knowing Elena, her death has affected me in ways I’m not quite able to articulate. It’s been a week of food and socializing; we’ve been staying with friends and family, and have been driving around and eating in restaurants and petting cats and taking walks in the sunshine. It’s all been very pleasant and ordinary. But every now and then, since I heard about Elena, I have been getting these flashes of — I don’t know what; they come and go so quickly I cannot even put a name to the emotion. I’ll be doing something totally normal and then for an instant I’ll feel like I’m falling into a void, like there’s nothing to hold on to, like I blinked and the world transformed around me into something I didn’t recognize. And really, it kind of has. The simple psychological explanation is that I forgot that I live in a world where sweet, beloved 18-year-olds of my family’s acquaintance can be killed for no reason… and now I remember.
Another, more complicated, layer of this explanation is that the death of others always reminds me of my own mortality. Hearing about Elena, Al’s friend, made me think that it could so easily have been one of my sisters, my best friends, or me… could still be me. My own life or that of any of my loved ones could — at any moment — likewise come to a screeching halt some dark chilly night. We never know when it might happen, but we all know that someday it will. We’re all born to die. Sometimes this thought reassures me, by teaching me to accept the inevitable. Sometimes it galvanizes me to do as much as I can in the time I do have: “rage, rage against the dying of the light,” etc. And sometimes it’s just too damn big and too terrifying to think about, both in the general sense and in the individual — which is I think why I have only been able to process Elena’s death in fits and starts, in these flashes of nothing and my subsequent meditations.
I have noticed in the past year that I feel things more deeply, now that I have begun these two practices: compassion and art. They go together; both teach me to remain open at all times, to be ready to receive whatever emotions and ideas come my way. So I’m a lot more creative and thoughtful these days, but the dark side is that I also cry a lot more easily, and feel more moved by more things.
These inexplicable flashes I’ve been having these past few days… I think they are some mixture of fear and panic and sorrow. The closest I can come to describing them is this: it’s as if, watching a friend open a refrigerator and take out some food, I have a half-second vision of everything around me in advanced stages of death and decay. The walls are crumbling, moldering; clothes and linens are disintegrating and flapping in the wind; the food is rotting; the people are all skeletons. I don’t actually *have* these visions, but I’m left as chilled and terrified as if this were what I saw. The flashes seem to say: “This is all a facade. You think this is normal, but it’s not. What’s normal is senseless death. The world you know is all a fake; it’s all nothing, and death is the only real thing.”
What keeps these flashes at bay is the understanding I’ve come to from my compassion and creativity practices: that the truth is both sides of the coin. Bland, quotidian, senseless life and frightening, unknowable, senseless death are both the norm. Living in wealth and security as we do, we’re usually shielded from this, but this is the fact of life. It’s not that life is any more meaningful than death; it’s just that we like it so much better. In the grand is-ness of our existence, Elena’s death makes just as much sense as my life; my comfortable, joy-filled being is just as random as her sudden absence… at least for those of us who have no afterlife concept to turn to when death enters our view. I don’t know; this all sounds so terribly grim, yet I find it somehow comforting. I guess it reminds me how precious life is, and ultimately, if this life is all we get, this knowledge is the only meaning there is in anything.
Our lives are immeasurably precious. If this is it, and it may be withdrawn at any time, then what we have now has value beyond words, beyond emotion, beyond anything we’re capable of even comprehending.
My love goes out to all Elena’s family and friends, and to her too, wherever or whatever she may now be. May the love she embodied in this world go on loving.
satsumabug.com | Lisa Hsia 
You have always been able to articulate what I can’t. I only met Elena once and yet every once in a while I’ll suddenly think of her and want to cry. It’s not because I knew her personally but more because of the feeling of Loss. You’re right that life is precious. Somehow I feel that it is more of tragic because she’s younger than me. I know this will happen the older I get – losing people who are younger than me. Not that it makes the deaths of people older than me any less sad but when I hear about somebody younger, it makes me really think about all the things I would never have done if it were me who had passed. And of course it’s another reminder that yes it could be me, or one of my sisters, or parents, or somebody else I know intimately and care about. and I think that’s what I’m feeling all at once when I think about Elena. And more I’m sure but I’m not so good at understanding and explaining my feelings as well as you.
It’s immensely reassuring to me that both you and Al read and understood this entry. It wasn’t until you left your comments that I realized I had written it just for the three of us. 🙂
Erik’s best friend Gabe’s car accident came when he was even younger than Elena — I believe it was in January of his sophomore year of high school. I think about this all the time… about how our lives would be different if we had Erik’s best friend to hang out with too, how he might have been Erik’s best man at the wedding, what he might have studied in college. And then I think maybe they would have grown apart like so many friends do after (or even during) high school. Gabe and Elena are frozen in time… we’ll never know who they might have become, for better or worse.
this is almost exactly how i feel! thank you for putting it into words.
writing that e-mail was cathartic, but, every once in a while, i still feel like i was punched in the stomach and all my insides fell out.
in the first couple of days after her accident, the smallest things would remind me of her. it was amazing–i was never the best of friends with elena, but she touched me in so many ways. i keep thinking about how, if she could affect me this much, how would the death of one of you or one of my best friends feel? it’s so easy for somebody to die, and elena was one of the liveliest people i knew. if she could go so suddenly, tomorrow i could have nobody.
As I just wrote in my reply to Shra’s comment: I didn’t know I had written this entry for me and you and Shra exclusively, until you both commented and I felt so much better. 🙂 What always comes first, before everything else? Breakfast? No, FAMILY.
Punched in the stomach is another good way of saying how it feels. I don’t think we’re capable of absorbing this kind of knowledge all at once; we’re hard-wired to just kind of be in shock and keep going with our lives. I think those “I’ve just been gutted” moments are the times when we really comprehend it.
[…] The closest I can come to articulating it is that it’s like the flashes of the void that I wrote about back in 2009, but now, the void has gotten bigger and darker and instead of coming to me in flashes, it just […]