I never know what to do when I find out a friend or classmate dies. It's a weird feeling knowing you'll never get to see or talk to someone who you're used to seeing everyday. It's a hard thing to deal with and it's an even harder thing to accept. It's been dubbed socially unacceptable to cry. You're seen as weak and overly emotional. That being said, I can count the number of times I've cried since age 10 on two hands. I instinctively bottle everything up and when it gets to be too much I spend the entire day crying, reading, writing and listening to Simon & Garfunkel.
A friend of mine from school died last night in a plane crash. It was the same crash that killed former Alaskan Senator and major Alaskan political figure Ted Stevens. There were nine people on the plane total. Only four of those people survive, some who are severely injured. Among the five that died was my friend, her mother and the previously mentioned Ted Stevens. So far the only thing the media has focused on Stevens, which with his 41 years serving Alaska is understandable but almost no information at all has been given about the others. It's almost disgusting how desensitized to death people are. Plane crashes happen all the time in Alaska (AK alone accounts for 36% of all of the United States' plane crashes). They happen so often that the 6 o'clock news barley mentions them and the newspapers have tiny blurbs.
My friend had everything going for her. She was a part of the DDF team (drama, debate & forensics), she was in the school plays, and she was a writer for the school newspaper (which is how we became friends). She went to Harvard last year for DDF. She had a good core group of friends. And now she's gone. When talking about her death another friend of mine kept saying things like "everything happens for a reason" and "at least she lived her life to its fullest." Honestly I think that's complete bullshit. Her life and her future was stolen from her. Those phrases would be better to describe the 90 year old deceased Senator than a 16 year old high school student with a bright future.
I didn't write this to get any sympathy because that would be better suited for her father and her brother who've lost a mother/wife and a sister/daughter. My intensions for writing this were to address just how fucked up our society is when it comes to dealing with death. It's even worse to know that the environment that I group up in made me just as fucked up as everyone else. Everyone would like to think that their the exception to the rule but that's almost never the case.
