Seeing the World

I was home for a week when I learned that my friend, Emma, from university was killed suddenly while biking.  I had just gotten over my jetlag and was immediately forced into a new state of perplexity.  A friend's octogenarian grandfather told her that "the first one is the hardest" - hopefully as an octogenarian, I will be able to understand this in a new way.  Now, though, as a 22-year old, my fourth time burying a peer - putting my friend in a box in the ground - I don't get it.  I've excitedly taken many opportunities to travel, to learn new skills, to gain new understandings and acquire more knowledge.  But burying my peers is one experience that I have never chosen: it has been forced upon me.

Sometimes well-meaning people say things like, "it was their time" or "she's in a better place" or "everything happens for a reason."  I'd love to agree with these people, and I am so happy for those who do find solace in those words, but I do not.  Nothing is the slightest bit easier this time than the first time.  Nothing is fun about this.  Nothing.

I've made some wonderful friends while travelling, and Emma was the first one.  In the winter of 2007-2008, I went on my school's Birthright trip, knowing no one else.  In the airport, with 45 other college students awaiting our flight to Israel, Emma sat chatting with another girl, Jessie.  They were the only girls in the airport that I felt truly comfortable approaching - they seemed open and easygoing.  When they replied to my request to watch my stuff while I went to the restroom with the quip that if I wasn't fast enough, they might sell it, I knew from that moment we'd be friends.  

The three of us spent the remainder of the 10-day trip inseparable, talking and giggling about everything from the hokey pro-Israel concert we attended to teenage pregnancies, our majors, our Jewishness, and our dating lives.  We remained friends upon returning to campus, and when they graduated and moved to New York City, I went to visit.  I was so excited about moving back to the same city and reconnecting this fall.

Emma was a rockstar.  In many ways, she lived the life that I hope to live: a lot of life was packed into her twenty four years.  She was a homecoming queen.  She always had a smile.  She was goofy, but knew when to be serious.  She knew how to ask questions to get people talking, and she knew how to listen to the answer.  She loved movies and went to see them often.  She loved sandwiches and took a road trip (coast to coast) sampling the sandwiches of different regions. She was a young woman searching harder than most to find her own unique inspiration - to figure out what she wanted to spend her life doing.  She loved fiercely and unashamedly.  


I can see nothing good in her wonderful life being cut short.  But I am going to continue striving, as I know she was, to live my life by this quote:  

Emma and I at Masada, 2008

Be well.  Live your life with love in your heart, 
xoxo
Samantha