BALLADS OF LIFE, DEATH, & EVERYTHING IN BETWEEN: A Month-Long Journey Along the Mortal Coil's Wide Paths

When I first heard the news that my grandmother was dead, the world stopped spinning and my legs gave out beneath me. Within a nanosecond, from what I remember, I was on the ground. Or I fell into the kitchen table, slid down into a chair.

In all honesty I'm not sure what happened after I heard my sister's voice.

I'd immediately assumed the worst; my sister rarely calls and I rarely call her. If she's calling me, I thought, at 8:30 at night, Eastern, a week and a half before Christmas, then someone had died.

Someone important and loved by both of us.

In her sobbing, I could only make out the important part of her call. It's all I remember, really.

"Grandma was killed in a car accident this morning and -- "

I don't remember what came after the and. The shock of it all stopped my brain from processing the rest.

My grandmother pretty much raised me. After my grandfather died, I'd moved in to her house on the farm to keep her company. I slept on her bedroom floor - despite having a bedroom of my own - from age nine until I entered seventh grade.

Every morning before school, the whole family would gather at her place. We'd all have coffee and toast, then I'd kiss her and her toy poodle goodbye, and we'd head off to start the day.

My grandmother was the only woman I can honestly say I've ever loved and trusted completely, my conscience, my keeper of secrets, my most trusted advisor.

And then, of course, there were her biscuits and gravy, her pancakes, the fondness for fried okra and bass fishing alone...

* * * *

Two days later, after spending the night in Cincinnati's train station (soothing, really, because most of the building is now home to the Queen City's best museums) and an 11-hour trip on Amtrak's Cardinal line into Charlottesville, I arrived back in the ol' Home State.

The train passed through West Virginia, 70 miles north of the town where she was born - tiny Newhall, a community of less than 700 people. One of more than a half-dozen children born or adopted by my great-grandparents in McDowell County, who were themselves from large Coal Country litters of children.

I imagined the hundreds, possibly thousands, of distant relatives roaming the Appalachians all around me as I passed through the state, staring at the imposing mountaintops and pristine whitewater stretches as the train rolled down the line.

I thought about her kinfolk, her brother she lost to the mines, the one she rarely would discuss, the stories of her parents and grandparents, her father's innovative "indoor plumbing" system (he built his house atop a spring, yet until the 1960s they still used an outhouse), and the stories her brother once told me that made her blush...

I was the last person in my family to speak to my grandmother alive, for two hours on the phone, a few days before her death. The last thing we talked about was her father and the Blair Mountain War - the fight of the miners to bring justice and fair wages to Appalachia, against company, state, and even federal forces.

And that, yes, is a huge burden.

I sat in silence, staring out at West Virginia for hours, thinking about that conversation.

And I found comfort in my thoughts.

* * * *

The next week sped along a blur of emotion, funeral arrangements, and estate issues. Grief took second seat to the reality of having to dispose of human remains, to settle insurance issues, to prepare family heirlooms for shipping and furniture for eventual auction.

My father and I each delivered eulogies. As with my grandfather's funeral, I did not shed a tear; in fact, I even cracked a few jokes. I'm sure some folks thought it was inappropriate; most, however, did not.

As a child with my Grandpa's death, I was honoring a grandparent's last request - be strong, don't cry, don't grieve in public, as it makes others cry. That was, well, a wrong-minded approach - not grieving simply masks the same reality as shudder-filled sobbing. But as an adult, I've managed through much meditation to shake off many of the Western traditions associated with the often selfish emotions tied to death.

For some reason, I feel comfortable enough with human mortality to simply stand in front of a church full of mourners, to remind folks that we all die, and that we remain in this world forever so long as those left tell their tale.

* * * *

From Virginia, a five-day trek across the US, to California, on a road trip. My dad, brother-in-law, and I left Christmas Eve morning, spent Christmas Eve at my place here in Oxford, Christmas Dinner a truck stop meal in western Missouri.

As strange as it was, it's actually one of the most adventurous, exciting holidays I've experienced since childhood. The only gift granted was the hum of wheels on the open highway.

And that, yes, I view as a blessing in disguise, a reminder at how big this country is, how full of life and diverse in terrain North America is, from sea to shining sea.

* * * *

Days in California passed too quick. After a little more than a week, I returned to Ohio, to an empty apartment filled with boxes of childhood toys, trinkets from my childhood, and a large portion of the family library (containing the collected literature of five generations).

The new year, already upon us. A return to work, to life, to the concerns of the living. As December marks the death of every year, so too does the following January mark the birth of a new one.

C'est la vie.

"Because of its tremendous solemnity," the philosopher Soren Kierkegaard wrote long ago, published in one of those works, "Death is the light in which great passions, both good and bad, become transparent, no longer limited by outward appearances."

“It is not death that a man should fear," Marcus Aurelius reported wrote again, in another one of those volumes, "But he should fear never beginning to live.”

After cleaning out the fridge, running to the store to reload on vittles, and unpacking my well-traveled bags, I sat down and closed my eyes.

A chance, yes, to catch my own breath, to rest in solitary peace for a moment.

- # # # -

ASPHALT AND CONCRETE, TOWNS AND HIGHWAYS: Road Trippin' with Superheroes, Throwing Away Money, & Indiana's Contribution to Facial Hair

FAIRFIELD, Ohio (ZP) -- The bookstore spun around me. I thought I was going to faint, right there, amongst the magazines and paperbacks.

Grief! Good God, the power of grief! Of witnessing the death of a trusted friend, a childhood mentor!

I'd heard about his murder, sure, back in 2005. Lots of people had. But only then, in the chilled silence of a bookstore, could I handle reading the gory details of his death.

A bullet through the skull, the trigger pulled by a trusted friend. The body incinerated in secret by the assassin's goons. I felt my legs starting to give out beneath me; I planted an arm into a shelf. My throat muscles constricted. I thought for a moment I was going to cry.

And then, suddenly, I was no longer alone.

"The OMAC Project is stellar. Kinda Sad, huh?"

I turned around to see this young woman, Middle-Eastern features with purple lipstick and a nose ring, staring at me with these sad eyes.

She understood. Everybody understands when an icon, fictional or real, dies.

"Oh. Yeah. It's taken me this long to get around to reading about it...Blue Beetle was a favorite of mine..."

I explained, rambled actually, about how I'd grown up reading many of the characters involved, how I wasn't really a comic fanboy type, that it was my birthday, I'd taken the day off from work, and I was just in the bookstore browsing when I saw a copy of The OMAC Project staring at me...

She laughed. And suddenly, I felt awkward, a total imbecilic spaz, as if I'd just told this complete stranger that I lived in my parents' basement and collected fucking Star Wars figurines.

Pretty girls, particularly those who obviously know more about the modern state of comic books than I do, make me nervous. I regained my composure, cleared my throat.

The Silver Age Blue Beetle was one of my favorites growing up, mainly through his short-lived 1980s solo series and the old Justice League International series. Hell, I never wanted to be Bruce Wayne or Batman when I was a kid -- too damned depressing. Superman? Please. The world's full of too many friggin' Boy Scouts. But billionaire IT company CEO and genius inventor Ted Kord, with his nonlethal BB Gun and his flying ship shaped like - you guessed it - a giant blue beetle? Now, that guy had a sense of humor, a flair for sarcasm and nonchalance and sheer love of being, well, a superhero.

And the writers and artists killed him off. One of my childhood heroes. Murdered in cold blood for the sake of plot development.

"So you're a Justice League fan? Oh my God... you HAVE to read this if you are..."

She reaches over my shoulder and pulls down a trade paperback copy of Identity Crisis, Brad Meltzer and Rags Morales' modern opus, one of the most controversial miniseries in comic history. In its pages one superhero's wife is raped and then murdered, another superhero's ex-wife goes crazy, and yet another person near-and-dear to the ol' Dark Knight 's heart loses his father in one of the most gut-twisting series of panels I've ever seen.

I would be buying that graphic novel, too, I explained. I was grateful when it turned out that she wasn't a nosy salesclerk, wasn't trying to get me to hurry up and buy something...

"So you're spending your birthday buying graphic novels?"

I started to come up with some sort of rational explanation. Yes, after my morning fishing trip had been abruptly canceled, I was indeed shopping for graphic novels on my Thirtieth birthday. But I wasn't... I wouldn't...

"That's so COOL!"

And we ended up talking for a good hour after I bought, yes, a few graphic novels as a birthday gift to myself, sharing a cup of joe at the chain coffee shop next door, discussing why, exactly, the Blue Beetle, Booster Gold, and obscure comic book characters sometimes change one's perception of life to the point where real people grieve when those superheroes die on paper.

She even held my hand as I explained how I was about ready to cry when she'd walked up behind me. She said that was the sweetest thing her 18-year-old ears had ever heard come out of a 30-year-old guy's mouth.

Hey, she was just easing my pain. Really. Seriously. I mean, c'mon... what 18-year-old girl would, well, hit on...

Aw crap.

There are worse ways, I guess, to turn the Big Three-Oh. I mean, how many guys get the phone numbers of recent high school graduates slipped to them because they're old enough to remember The Crisis of Infinite Earths miniseries and the day Barry Allen, the Silver Age Flash, died?

* * * *

HAMILTON, Ohio (ZP) -- He says that he's the Nobody Man, that the drugs had done him in and his brains were gone, that he wasn't much of a man without his beer first thing in the morning.

He has a name, he says, somewhere lost in his past. He prefers to cook up new names when strangers pass by, interesting and peculiar names, in the hope that some poor schmuck will hook him up with some drinking money.

Downtown. South Monument Avenue. Beneath the afternoon shadow of Billy Yank, German immigrant Rudolph Thiem's gorgeous sculpture, bronzed and perfect atop the Butler County Soldiers, Sailors and Pioneers Monument Building.

And I give a fresh ten-dollar bill to a Nobody Man, one of the drug-zombified, one of its marginally homeless, one of the City of Sculpture's lost causes. Thiem's sculpture represents the victory of the Union over the separatist southern Confederacy of the 19th century. Nobody Man's face alone could serve as a scarred monument to a nation's failures.

He grew up in the city, this Nobody Man. His grandmother, he claimed, worked in one of the city's legendary, forgotten brothels, back when men like John Dillinger hid out in plain sight in the city's streets, back when the Mob Bosses of Big Chicago turned Hamilton, Ohio, into Little Chicago.

He'd been a soldier once, a factory worker, an inmate, a steelworker, and, always, a drunk. And sometime in the 1990s he found religion in the form of methamphetamine, that marvel of home-cooked, trailer park chemistry. After doing a bit of time in County for, well, being a junkie who never figured out how to dodge possession charges or child support payments, he went clean...

... And he's been on the streets ever since. He shows me his arms. The scabs are gone. And so is, sadly, most of his mind.

He can't hold a job because, well, he hears voices of angels, demons, and biblical characters. He keeps getting evicted from flophouses because, well, he's still substituting the cheap booze for prescription meds he can't afford.

I gave him the ten-spot because he looked like he could use it. I gave him the rest of my pack of cigarettes because he'd asked for one or two, had offered to give me the money back for just a smoke.

Giving isn't about the recipient's intended use. It's something humans do as an unspoken bond, almost as a form of communication. It's how we let people know, without words, that they still mean something, even if the world says that they don't.

Strolling back towards my pickup, a concerned woman, mid-thirties, walks up beside me as I'm waiting for on crosswalk signal. She'd apparently been watching my conversation and exchange with the Nobody Man from afar. And she wanted to voice her unsolicited opinions, too.

"...Honey, that crackhead's gonna just blow that money..."

"...You just threw your money away on a black..."

"...You gotta be careful with those NEE-ggers. They'll rob you around here..."

It's a free country. Everybody has a right to express their opinions. So I expressed a few of my own.

"So tell me, lady: why didn't your mama do the world a favor and just scrape your fetus outta her with a rusty coat hanger?"

If I have to hear somebody else's racist rant, well, I have just as much right to tell that person that I question their very existence, their value in society.

God bless the First Fucking Amendment. And at least ten bucks and a pack of cigarettes made some poor guy's day.

Yeah, it's an evil, barbaric, crude world, lady.

* * * *

LIBERTY, Ind. (ZP) -- Facial hairstyles would not be what they are today if it weren't for the former U.S. Civil War commander who was born here, in this sleepy little Hoosier town.

Former U.S. Gen. Ambrose Everett Burnside, commander, Army of the Potomac, November 1862 to March 1863. First president of the National Rifle Association. Jilted ex-lover of Confederate spy (and Oxford Fucking Ohio native) Lottie Moon. Gunsmith and inventor of the Burnside Carbine rifle. Governor and Senator of Rhode Island...

Fascinating guy, really.

Like I said. Unless you're a U.S. Civil War buff, or, well, have a peculiar interest in really shitty war strategists from that time period, you probably could care less.

Now take a look at that last name again: Burnside. If you flip the syllables, you get the word sideburn. There have been many names for the ol' hairy cheeks look over the centuries, but, now, the English-speaking World over, everybody knows sideburns when they see them.

Elvis. Evel Knievel. Luke Perry. The Beatles. Isaac Asimov. Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson...

... And, well, pretty much every schlocky lounge lizard, biker, and disco performer of the last fifty years or so...

It all starts here, baby. Liberty Friggin' Indiana.

"Hey Jason... When you gonna write a Union County thing? We're only a few minutes away, man!" She asked in her email. "We're interesting."

As I stare at the long-dead, long-forgotten general's name on a memorial plaque in front of the Union County Courthouse, smack dab in the middle of a tiny Midwestern town square, I start laughing to myself, almost hysterically, as I instinctively reach up with both hands to feel my own tiny sideburns.

An old man and his wife are sitting on a bench nearby. The old man laughs, hollers my way.

"We gave the world sideburns. And we're damn proud of it."

Liberty Friggin' Indiana.

Well, I'll be damned...

It all starts here, baby. Middle of nowhere in particular.

- # # # -

DEEJAYS OF THE DEAD: Kick Out the Jams, Motherfucker... And Don't Touch the Casket...

After your death you were better have a bad epitaph than their ill report while you live.

- Hamlet, Act II, Sc. II, c. 1600 A.D. (Really Old School)

Hey deejay, just play that song. Keep me dancin', all night long.

- World's Famous Supreme Team, c. 1984 A.D. (Not-So-Old School)

OXFORD, Ohio (ZP) -- The tale began as such...

Two men in suits walked into a local electronics store, asked the salesclerk for help locating a replacement P.A. system. Theirs, they claimed, had burned out and they were on a tight deadline. The clerk, in an effort to make a quick sale, proceeded to show off the electronic store's wares...

Sounds pretty, well, normal, right?

The storyteller, the salesclerk, stared down into his fresh drink as if waiting for that next word, for the bourbon to free his tongue. Suddenly, like the blowing of a fuse or the sputtering of an old engine, his tongue caught up to his brain.

Dude wait! he said. No, this is weird. Dude! Shut up for a minute. It gets better...

* * * *

The guys weren't Men in Black, weren't extras from some lost episode of the X-Files, or Mormon missionaries looking to start a rock band. No, the suits were from a local funeral home, and were on a deadline to get a memorial service set up in time...

The salesclerk notified the pair that, well, to get such a P.A. on such short notice would be highly expensive and, more than likely, pure overkill for the mundane task of amplifying eulogies and graveside sermons. Instead, he suggested, he could do them a favor, loan them his personal amplifier rather than sell them something they really didn't need.

In his spare time, you see, the clerk also deejays at various bars and house parties in and around Oxford Fucking Ohio. And, being that there really hasn't been much work for a deejay in recent weeks, and his equipment's just been sitting around...

Fuck it. Why the hell not?

It was, after all, somebody's funeral. And, well, if it were his relative lying in state, he'd have wanted his departed loved one to have the best audio equipment possible, to be able to go out in style, with every eulogy and tearful remembrance heard by all, loud and clear.

Wait! he exclaimed as he sipped on his bourbon. NOW it gets creepy, dude...

* * * *

After work, the suits picked him up in their corpsemobile, loaded his precious deejaying equipment up like some cold old widow from the nursing home.

No, not a hearse. A corpsemobile.

Corpsemobiles are basically modified cargo vans, used by funeral homes to retrieve bodies from homes and morgues. Hearses are generally used for ceremony, limousines of the Dead built for those one-way trips to the graveyard. Corpsemobiles, on the other hand, do most of the day-to-day work, veritable garbage trucks built plain and rugged, built solely to move our Mortal Remains out of the way as quickly as possible.

Corpsemobiles are for pick-ups. Hearses are for deliveries. The Death Business is more complicated that it seems.

Dying's easy for those doing the dying. For all of the tragedy and sadness, well, death really does equate more with eternal rest. Actually working with the dead, however, is the responsibility of the living. It requires a dedicated efficiency, meticulous timing, an understanding that corpses, at the end of the day, are nothing more than the scraps left over from life's assembly line.

Once, I myself hitched a ride in the back of a corpsemobile, sharing space with the paid passenger, a teenager who'd been killed by a drunk driver. Her beer-swilling friend, the driver told me, had promised to get her home safe. Instead, she'd ended her prom night as nothing more than coroner-released cargo in a bloody prom dress...

Quite comfortable. Good suspension on those corpsemobiles. Almost overkill, really. It's not like most of the cargo will ever complain. But, well, deejaying equipment is, sadly, lmore fragile than your average dead body -- sometimes, those marvelous shocks and struts come in handy.

* * * *

Dude, that fucking stretcher was creepy! the clerk continued. Just thinking about dead people makes me... you know...

...Fucking weird shit, dude...

He shuddered, sipped his bourbon, ended his story.

At the funeral home, he sat up his loaned equipment in silence, with no audience other than the body of his benefactor. He didn't even do a proper sound check - none of the music he normally queued up in his sets seemed appropriate for the stage the mortuary staff had set...

He tossed back the last of his whiskey and ordered another.

There's something disturbing about, you know, being the Deejay of the Dead, dude.

I doubt any deejay would disagree with that assessment, actually.

- # # # -

WHEN AS DUST, WE ALL JOIN THE GREAT WORK: Hey, Uncle Rich! Got the Trowels Clean! Can I Butter Some Stone Now?

HE WAS AN ARTIST.
HE CONQUERED STONE WITH HIS FLESH.
BLOOD OF CONCRETE, ROCKS IN HIS BONES,
HEART OF GOLD

Those words would've been perfect for my uncle's tombstone, if he'd wanted one. Not some silly factory-ready epitaph, not some stupid bullshit greeting card farewell, and certainly no Bible verses.

Listening to my parents' voicemail Wednesday morning, that was all I could think about as I sat on the loading dock at work, staring at a rusting brown Dumpster, wishing I could cry.

He was an artist, and I can visit him anytime.

My uncle had, after fighting cancer for several years, departed this world, mere days after the last of his children graduated from high school. And he fought until the end, fought for every breath, just as he'd fought every other thing that'd tried to break him.

He left my aunt with explicit instructions - no funeral, memorial service, or other frivolous things. His ashes are to be delivered unto the Columbia River, his soul left to bond with the salmon and the grizzly bear.

Rich was an artist, and now he'll be turned to dust.

And for an artist built like a grizzly, there is perhaps no better ending. He died in his sleep, entering his own eternal hibernation, to one day awake in another, freer world, where his growl scares no one but the wind, where he can be happy with that. He deserves one hell of a monument, but he'd rather just be returned to the earth, to the Wild West wilderness that spawned him.

And even though my aunt says she's not ready to part with him just yet, she'll one day take him down to the river, my five grown cousins in tow, and grant his last wish.

Still, I thought I'd better write him an epitaph. Words are, well, cheap, but they can occasionally mean something.

* * * *

Rich was an artist, and I don't care what the world says.

When I was a child, I used to watch him conquer quarried stone and build magnificent things, structures that would shame the architects of the Great Pyramids.

At the time of his death, he'd last been employed as a mechanic. He'd worked numerous other jobs, worked on a ranch, as a short-order cook, a carpenter.

But in my memories, Rich was, and will always be, a stonemason, the master of hammer and chisel and trowel, one with the ancients who built Stonehenge and the Roman Aqueduct, a modern incarnation of the everyday artist who built Europe's great cathedrals and the Great Wall of China.

Watching him work his trowels, watching those tools butter up bricks and granite and other stones, was like watching de Vinci sketch or Titian select models.

He'd stare at a pallet full of flat stones for an hour, pick through them like a child digging through a box of chocolates, lay them out on the ground in seemingly random patterns. And then he'd pull his masonry hammer from his belt, chip off a few corners here and there, birthing order from his chaotic mess.

Rich would then prep his surfaces, apply his wire backing, and mix his mortar precisely. As he worked his way up from the bottom, his chaotic piles of rocks would grow into chimneys and foundations and facades, retaining walls and fireplaces. As he finished, as he would work his knives over the joints, adding a groove here or there, leaving his own subtle signature in the mortar.

* * * *

He worked best with a large chew of tobacco in his cheek, with plenty of soda pop handy and country or classic rock music playing in the background.

Occasionally, he'd even try to sing - with a mouth full of Skoal, brown spit dripping down his beard as he bellowed out of tune. On most job sites, other construction workers would beg him not to dance, too, as the laughter generated could potentially lead to an accident.

As funny as it was, it was a thing of beauty. But then again, Rich was a beautiful man.

* * * *

Rich was a master, a man of dust and stone, in place of flesh and bone.

I spent portions of two summers working with him on job sites, sweating away in the Virginia heat for a whopping wage of $3.75 an hour, watching him build his marvelous creations and, most importantly, learning to build my own.

I hauled cinder blocks through tick-infested fields, dragged wet concrete up flights of scaffolding. I cleaned out at least a thousand buckets, chipped off at least a ton of dry cement from bucket trowels and tuck trowels and wheelbarrows and mixers.

Day after day, I'd cough up concrete dust for the first fifteen minutes of lunch breaks, learned to love cans of cold pork and beans and tins of mustard-covered sardines. I'd eat in silence and then stare at my poor blistered hands and bloody forearms for another fifteen minutes.

I'd hurt some days so bad that I'd want to cry. And as we'd drive home at the end of the day, he'd poke fun at my occasional whining, buy me a Coke (and sometimes a bottle of beer, if I worked hard), and debate the finer points of everything.

But I never once considered quitting. When one gets an opportunity to watch an artist, to be taught by one, only idiots and other worthless bastards walk away, crying about hardship.

True artistry is not taught in classrooms, nor explained by neutered MFAs in sterile lectures. And true art is hard, dirty work, rugged and mean and covered with scars. The carpenter is no different than the sculptor, the person who rivets the steel girders of bridges and high-rises the equal of muralists and photographers.

The rest is just bullshit history, the kind written by pompous architects, theorists, and other worthless critics. Art is not for them. It remains in the eye of the beholder, and it takes many forms. There is art, somewhere, in everything crafted by Man.

Rich was an artist, and he taught me to trust the dust.

* * * *

My Uncle Rich will soon be turned to dust, cremated down to the same gray dust that once covered his jeans and his shirts. And his ashes will one day clump atop of the water of the Columbia, floating along the surface for a time, then sinking to the riverbed.

And somewhere at the bottom of that mighty Pacific Northwest river, his human remains will mix with sediment, will bind with it, and will fill the crevices in between the worn river rocks. And there, finally, the creator will become part of the Great Creation, grout to hold stones in place, to slow down their eventual erosion, mortar against the forces of nature.

It is a perfect final work for a master mason.

* * * *

I have yet to cry. I don't think I can, actually.

I last spoke to my uncle two years ago, when he called my parents' house one Christmas, to wish his big sister's family a happy holidays.

We spoke for maybe five minutes, about nothing in particular. He did, however, brag about the beauty of the Oregon countryside, brag on his five sons, and brag on his life.

He was content.

And from what I've heard, he spent the rest of his days trying to keep it that way.

* * * *

Rich was an artist, and I can show you the marvelous stonework he created with his own hands.

Oh yeah, that two-story stone fireplace up at the Wintergreen Resort? He built that sucker. One of the homeowner's neighbors once called it the most beautiful fireplace she'd ever seen. And I think that may be the best compliment anyone ever gave him. As I rode home with him that night, the three hours back to the farm, he kept referring to himself as The Artiste...

That foundation on that farmhouse out in Burkeville? Hell, he and I spent four days digging those footers, and that lady's goose attacked us every morning. The damn thing even shit on the bucket trowels anytime we left 'em sitting around too long.

Oh, and that blockwork out in Buckingham? Took forever. Every day we'd get on-site, work for five minutes, and then it'd rain. Rich would just get pissed, kick something, swear at the sky. But it went up eventually.

And, yeah, he never once trusted me with a float. Said I put too much pressure on the concrete, left indentations. Never once saw 'em, but he swore up and down they were there...

And we can go to Oregon, too, and I'll show you his last masterpiece...

- # # # -

AN EDUCATION COVERED IN BLOOD: Answering Questions That Shouldn't Need To Be Asked...

What candles may be held to speed them all?
Not in the hands of boys but in their eyes
Shall shine the holy glimmers of good-byes.
The pallor of girls' brows shall be their pall;
Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,
And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.

- Wilfred Owen, "Anthem for Doomed Youth," 1917

OXFORD, Ohio (ZP) - It was an Amtrak operator who first discovered the girl's body, limp alongside the bed of the train tracks early Saturday morning.

The girl, according to what little is known, had been drunk and abandoned by friends to the unseasonably cold Ohio night. No one will ever know why, exactly, the 19-year-old was wandering the streets alone, why she was wandering the streets alone at night, about a mile from her campus dorm room.

Her blood alcohol level, according to local authorities, hovered somewhere near twice the legal limit, somewhere above 0.229 percent. Under Ohio law, 0.08 percent is considered legally impaired.

Her hands were covered in black exes and other bar markings, indicating that she was a minor. Though it's now known that she'd been drinking at a house party prior to hitting the Uptown district, it's highly unlikely that she didn't find some way of obtaining booze while at the bars.

The driver of the southbound CSX train didn't even realize that he'd hit anything when he was notified in nearby Hamilton. His locomotive had passed through Oxford 90 minutes prior to the Amtrak train.

Sometime in the next week, the family of a 19-year-old Speech Pathology major will bury their daughter in Strongsville, a suburban Cleveland city of almost 44,000 residents.

Beth was in her first year at the Local U. She'd transferred earlier in the year. Her Facebook profile picture was one of a smiling, happy girl, embracing some other smiling, happy girl.

I teared up up looking at the face of yet another dead college student.

* * * *

I've seen many dead college students over the course of my short life.

I've seen the gleeful face of a murdered Wyoming student plastered across the television screen, a young man executed for simply being open about his sexuality. At Cal Poly, as an undergrad and as a reporter, I covered the kidnappings, torture and deaths of two classmates.

And I still don't talk much about the shooting at Northern Colorado during my first ol' college try, the one where my friends and I sat in a dining hall and watched the CNN footage of a madman shooting from the windows until he was finally brought down by a police sniper.

Many people throw out completely jingoistic garbage about the College Experience.

Going to college is the only way to succeed in America, going to the right school can get you that dream job, or a college education will improve your life, help you make friends, help you grow into a responsible adult.

Those people, in their over-zealousness, often forget to explain the darker side. Maybe they don't know or maybe they just don't care.

Going to college, in the United States, can get you killed.

* * * *

In Blacksburg, they're mourning the loss of their fallen comrades, too. But it's not merely a young girl who wandered in front of a trail on a cold night, not merely an accident.

Thirty-three dead. Students and faculty, noted scholars and budding, bright young minds.

According to official accounts, there was only one gunman, one very angry, disturbed young man - he, too, is one of the dead students who will never see another graduation day.

Virginia Tech now joins a solemn club within higher education. Like Kent State and the University of Texas, like Jackson State and Cal State Fullerton, another university will bury its butchered scholars - its aspiring musicians, its writers, its poets and scientists.

No championship football season, no amount of Nobel Prizes or Rhodes Scholarships, will replace what that university lost on that cold Monday in April. None of those things have ever, after all, resurrected the dead.

A phantom stain will forever haunt its campus, the imaginary smell of blood hovering above its classrooms and dormitories. And no amount of scrubbing, no amount of vigils, memorials, or university committees will ever remove that, no amount of administrative or political whitewashing will ever erase that from the collective memory of those who survived.

* * * *

Already, the finger-pointing and politicization has begun about what happened in that quiet Appalachian town this week, the analysts and pundits spouting off about every scapegoat imaginable:

It's the guns. No wait! It's the meds the kid was taking, the failure of the psychologists. I've got it! It's another dangerous foreigner. No, no, no - listen to me! My causes are next! It's the lack of God in this country! We need prayer!

We need better campus police! It's the NeoCons, the Liberals, the President! The War in Iraq caused this! Let us protest...yes, a protest will save us!

Absalom, Absalom! Let us find answers quickly, my Countrymen! The pain is too much! Our children are dead, and we must assign blame...

And they will offer every theory imaginable, to sell their books, to move their causes forward, to maybe, possibly, legitimately do some good. But they will never provide any answers. And we'll all chose sides, divvy up our opinions like vultures along a roadside, picking and choosing theories based on how secure and comfortable they leave each of us feeling.

No one will ever know, truly, what went through a lonely South Korean kid's mind before he put a bullet through it, ending his rampage through Blacksburg.

And no one, here, in Oxford, will ever really know why that 19-year-old girl ended up in front of that CSX freight train, either.

Of course, her death won't make the national or international headlines. Death, in the press, is measured in terms of spent ammunition and body counts.

Ask the analysts.

* * * *

No one should even try to fool themselves into thinking that America's college campuses are the literal ivory towers they sometimes appear to be. There is no sanctuary from the cold reality of our world, not in Blacksburg and not in Oxford.

Senseless death is just as much a part of the college experience, for way too many campuses, as overpriced textbooks and cheap-tasting dining hall food. Estimates place alcohol-related campus fatalities at roughly 1,500 per year. According to the Centers for Disease Control, as many as 24,000 attempt suicide each year - the equivalent, roughly, of the entire campus population of the Local U., including faculty and staff - and another 1,100 succeed where the 24,000 thankfully failed.

We are, and will probably continue, to be a violent culture, societally schizophrenic in how we choose to look at how we live, and why we make the choices we do, and why certain things happen to good and bad people alike.

In America, on its pristine college campuses and in its libraries, through our literature and film, we fight a war as old as humanity itself, a war within ourselves, a war to both love and despise thy neighbor, a war to understand life and death from mortal coil.

Most importantly, we fight our own battles, daily, to simply find comfort in the answer to the Question Why?.

Our war, our wretched internal cultural war full of moral relativity and World Superpower pragmatism and self-pandering, never reaches its zenith and never will.

One cannot win any war against a mirror reflection, an inverse version of one's self, revealing all of the flaws one refuses, through ignorance or denial, to even acknowledge. There must first be acceptance of what answers lie beneath the glass, the things we fear or are afraid to admit to ourselves.

Why? questions are never answered simply by declaration. The why? questions must be thought about first, and then asked.

Why? questions, in Blacksburg and here, offer no easy answers. But the more we think about them, the more we ponder holistically, asking before answering, the more solutions to problems we may be able to unearth.

There are no experts of human nature better at answering these types of questions than ourselves, and that responsibility falls squarely on the shoulders of each and every one of us. It is our duty, as the living, to ask questions for the dead, to find education beyond Finals Weeks, nostalgic alumni memories, beyond everything and anything that could possibly be taught in a classroom.

That is what college students are supposed to learn in college - the ability to think, to ask, and to answer. They shouldn't have to learn, in a civilized world, how to lay wreaths on the headstones of peers, to look for shelter at the sound of gunshots.

Maybe, one day, we can live in a world, or can at least be able to send children to college, without worrying about that.

* * * *

What candles may be held to speed them all?

There aren't enough candles in all the world.

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