My early career in the Navy was backwards. In November, I arrived at Officer Candidate School in Newport R.I.--actually, I almost didn't, but that's a different story--and spent four frigid months there, running at five in the morning with two sets of sweats, long-johns, a scarf, woolly hat, and gloves and still freezing. Graduation day in February was incredibly cold. I spent the next summer in Orlando FL at Nuclear Power School. The uniform we wore was 100% polyester, with all the ability to breathe of a plate glass window. Every afternoon at about two o'clock it rained, which reduced the temperature not a whit, but raised the humidity back up to 100%. This was followed by winter in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., where our Chevette was buried by snowplows, then a hot summer in Virginia Beach for Guided Missile School at the Dam Neck base and a cold winter in Groton CT for Submarine School.
But it was in Orlando that this story starts. We lived in an apartment complex, the entry to which required turning left from South Bumby Avenue. I had stopped to let an oncoming car pass before turning. A boy on a bicycle was coming out of the apartment complex, saw me stopped, assumed I had stopped to let him out, smiled in thanks, and pulled out. Directly into the path of the oncoming car.
Time slowed to a crawl. My hands went to my head as my mouth opened in a silent scream. I should have sounded the horn, but there hadn't been time. The side mirror on the oncoming car gouged a hole in the boys side, and the ambulance crew said that he was unlikely to survive. Later, in a twist of irony, I got a letter from the insurance company of the woman who was driving the car that hit him, asking for a witness statement in her claim for the damages to her car.
I am haunted by that scene to this day. I really wish he hadn't smiled at me just before being killed. But the immediate impact was an overwhelming feeling of helplessness. I wanted to do something, anything, to atone for my involvement in such a stupid, senseless death. In the end, I remembered that friends of mine like to ride bicycles around Orlando, but didn't have lights on their bikes. So I bought a pair of lights, and gave them to my friends that evening. They said they probably wouldn't use them, because the dynamos added drag; but at least I had done something, however futile.
That was over thirty years ago, but I was vividly reminded of it last Thursday. A friend has a rescued rottweiler mix named Lucy, who could be a handful at the best of times. While out for a walk, Lucy spotted another dog across the street, became consumed with the need to protect her master from the other dog, slipped out of her harness and dashed into the road. She was hit by a car, and killed. As he recounted the event, I could see again the slow-motion march to the inevitable, with its attendant feelings of helplessness, followed by the guilty self-recriminations of "if I had only tied the harness more tightly, or kept better control, or turned around as soon as I saw the other dog." I struggled to find how to express my understanding, especially of the need to do something to make the whole death less senseless.
Jump back forty years. My parents were good friends with a couple in London with whom they had lived in the 1950s, during my father's first tour in England. This couple, Mollie and Lesley Wall, had only one child, a son named Christopher. He married a Canadian woman, moved to Canada, and they were very happy. One night in the mid 1970s, Christopher was driving home when a drunk driver crossed the median, slammed into his car, and killed him. A senseless death. And for Mollie and Lesley, the end of their line. Lesley did not live much longer, and Mollie's best friend became the gin bottle. I may have been in the egocentric agony of adolescent angst, but still I vividly remember the despair the Walls felt. Rabbi Kushner's book When Bad Things Happen to Good People hadn't even been published yet.
In this whirligig of time travel on which we have commenced, let us now jump ahead to December, 2006. A senior at Old Dominion University (ODU), Claire Cucchiari-Loring had been dating a man four years older than her named Robert. They had been dating for five years, and she had moved into his apartment. But problems in the relationship developed, and he turned violent towards her. She moved out, and was working on getting a restraining order against him. On December 8th, she and friends went out for dinner at the Olive Garden on Greenbrier Parkway. They thought this was probably the safest place, because it is close to a busy, well-lit mall and well away from ODU. But as Claire left, Robert met her at her car. He argued with her, then shot and killed first her, then himself.
A senseless death. Three weeks later she would have been 23.
I do not know the anguish her parents went through. I can only guess at the pain. So much hope, so much potential, wiped out in an instant. And yet, last Friday, my concern over how to find meaning in the senseless death of a dog was upstaged by the remarkable way in which Claire's parents have given meaning to her death. Claire had been fast becoming a remarkable jazz singer, both as a soloist and in the jazz singing ensemble at ODU. While we will never hear more from her, her parents have ensured that many jazz vocalists can hone their talents in her memory, by establishing a scholarship fund to support music students at ODU. On Friday we attended a concert and silent auction to raise further funds for the scholarship. The jazz vocal group gave us a spine-tingling a cappella rendition of The Way You Look Tonight, followed by two hours of piano duets featuring John Toomey and, taking a break from his world tour, Justin Kauflin.
It was strangely appropriate for Justin to be playing, because he is living proof how, through faith, a tragedy can be redefined to be a triumph. An amazing student, he gradually lost his sight and was totally blind by the time he was 11. But by then he had developed a love of the piano, and when he got into the Governor's School for the Arts, the music department suggested he shift from classical to jazz, to reduce the emphasis on reading music. (There is a braille code for music, but with two hands on the piano and at least one hand to read the braille, any normal human rapidly runs out of hands.)
I could go on to describe his meteoric rise to the heights of the jazz piano world, but others have done so better than I could. And to truly understand, please watch the film Keep On Keepin' On. (It's available on both Amazon and Netflix.) When you do, you too will see how Justin, despite the fame, has remained one of the most humble, loving people anyone could hope to meet, and I count myself among those privileged few.
We have jumped around through history, and it is time to come back to the moment. Next week I will write about the different ways we can achieve immortality in our influence on the world, both through our genes in our offspring, and more importantly through our contribution to the cultural history of the human race. But for now, let us reflect on the fact that we all will die, and for some of us it may happen long before we had planned. How can we ensure that our own death, or the death of those we love, will add to the beauty of the world rather than subtract from it?
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