A week ago today, a good friend of ours died in a tragic scuba diving accident in Monterey. Her name was Melissa Quaresma. It’s been a rough week, and I’ve been trying to figure out what to write about it, and when.
Denial is an interesting.. no, funny.. no, well.. it’s a thing, okay? You remember this person. This sweet, kind, vital, full of life, 26-year-old young woman, and it just doesn’t make any damned sense that she’s no longer here. That there’s now a world without this person. You expect at any moment that she’s going to pop up on Facebook and say, “Okay guys. Everyone needs to chill. I’m fine, this was a big misunderstanding, it got blown WAY out of proportion, just please get a grip. Everything’s fine.”
And I know that’s denial. Melissa was buried yesterday. The memorial service has been scheduled. Nevertheless, it still feels not at all real. And things that don’t feel real aren’t easy to write about.
What makes her death so hard and painful is that there’s just no way to rationalize it. Death lives in a cultural blind spot in America, I think – we all tacitly agree just not to go there, and when death inevitably does show up, we have a toolbox of social responses to continue our avoidances. They all boil down to some version of, “He/she brought it on themselves”, which in turn is really just another way of saying, “I’m safe, because I don’t smoke/drink/do drugs/rob banks/sleep around/whatever, so this isn’t going to be me.”
But Melissa did none of those things. She didn’t bring it on herself. There’s no one to blame.
It just happened.
And it’s pretty difficult to deal with “just happened”. It feels so arbitrary, so random. Without purpose or meaning. Which means that it can happen to any of us, at any time, for any or no reason whatsoever. The illusion of permanence is torn away and we’re left to rebuild the blind spot, because without that selective forgetfulness, it’d be pretty difficult to deal with life. Because a lot of life just happens.
The last week has been filled with a lot of quiet talk, remembrance, shock, disbelief, hurt and a desperate reaching forward to find a handhold of meaning to grab onto. We grieve for Melissa, grieve for her grieving husband John, and grieve for all the friends and family whose lives have been so shockingly upturned by a failed scuba tank. We grieve for a lost innocence, realizing that so many things change now for so many people we care about.
Today, think about your blind spots, the lacunas of your loved ones. Let them know what they mean to you. Because as much as “life is fragile, appreciate each moment” is a cliché, it’s only a cliché until the moment when it’s not.
Then it’s something that just happened.