Washington Week: Student Voices (O)

Column: Death raises questions of mortality for the first time
By Emily Hemson
OSU Daily Barometer Oregon State U.
May 01, 2008

I will forever be halted by the sound of a train whistle.

We were sitting in a lecture hall when they told us the news.

"Two students," our dean began, "were hit and killed by a train early this morning."

As the dean's words began to reveal the names of the students and where they had lived, random shrieks and cries began to sprout from different sections of the auditorium.

Doors were opened and closed, as students left in a hurry.

Once the ruckus had ended, a professor stood in front of the lecture hall and told us tales of Stalin.

Apparently, a lecture on the Bolshevik Revolution does not have time to stop for death.

Heading back to my dorm, I was continually plagued by the names of the students. The male involved had a ring to his name that sounded oddly familiar.

As I approached my dorm, I saw two of my friends who lived on my floor. Gathered with a pack of people, my friends looked as though they'd been kicked in the stomach.

"Did you know the kids?" I asked.

"Yeah, it was Bill," one replied.

Suddenly, I realized.

When you die, nicknames are seldom used. I may not have recognized the boy's name initially, but that was because I knew him by a different name.

Outside our dorms were mobs of news reporters asking anyone that would respond to them questions that pried and preyed on the event.

Police cars surrounded the train tracks, and wherever you went became a constant reminder of the event that had occurred early that morning.

Bill and I were not best friends, but I knew him.

I'd see him when I stopped by my friend's room for a visit. I knew stories about his life; I'd seen pictures he'd taken.

He was a very real person, who one day, because of some random train accident, no longer existed.

While I watched his friends brave campus with clenched jaws and sleep-ridden eyes, I kept waiting for something. A way to fix this loss, a point where everything would be better, but that point just didn't exist.

Just as the lecture continued on that morning after we were told the news, so did everything else.

Bill was gone, and that was a fact we all just had to deal with.

There is something so poignant about the first person you know who dies.

The first person you know who dies not because of old age or a slow, progressive disease but instead just disappears.

And what are we supposed to do with this absence?

For me, it became the first time I ever had to question my mortality. Suddenly the feeling of being invincible that I'd come to college with became less certain.

We'd all been on those train tracks, on random nights of the week, and why on that one particular evening did those kids have to get hit? Why couldn't they have heard the train whistle?

All these questions existed, as they do when someone dies unexpectedly, and there is no proper answer.

Do we embrace life in spite of it? Or do we curl up and become nervous and anxious over everything that poses a threat?

It would be nice if there were some simple answers.

For me, I'll just continue to stop every time I hear a train whistle and hope there's no one standing on the tracks.

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