Durham, North Carolina
What to do with the dead?
Along with I go where I am led, with which it accidentally rhymes, that question could be the motto of sobsey.com.
This week the question comes again, in the bluntest terms.
My first serious girlfriend, Amanda Davis, died last week in an airplane crash, along with her parents. She was 32 years old. Amanda, whom I knew as Mandy, had emerged as a writer of growing fame, and was touring to promote her first novel, Wonder When You'll Miss Me. Her father was flying her around North Carolina in his Cessna 178, and her mother had joined them to attend Mandy's bookstore readings. Shortly after noon on Friday, March 14th, they took off from Asheville airport into cloud cover, and apparently Mandy's father took the plane down too low in an effort to gain visual clarity. They crashed into a mountain.
I keep asking or being asked this question, What to do with the dead? Having already eulogized Carl Dolan on this site, I'm starting to suspect that my answer is I write about them. I often think this whole site is an elegy: to the Anasazi, to Angkor, to my love with Eve. So it should be no great shift of purpose to attend to the newly dead. But it pisses me off that people I love or have loved die young and suddenly, in unlikely and gruesome ways. I am angry at the insistent call to annotate their curtailed lives, yet I seem to have no choice. Although Mandy carved her name on Inscription Rock, we've been left to chisel in the details.
I'm tempted to draw the obvious connection between the war in Iraq and the dead in my life, and to note that my mother will have been to three funerals by the end of this week. But this abundance of death is merely a temporal proximity, posing as my life's ruling condition -- a Saturn transit. I wrote not long ago that the great hand of the world -- the impartial, unblinking world made of ore and dirt -- comes to sweep away our plans whenever it wants to. You're supposed to be reading this week about my December in San Francisco, but I've been charged instead to tell another story. It's the story of the girl I was in love with when I was eighteen.
If you want to read more about her, visit www.amandadavis.com, or go to www.mcsweeneys.net, which is currently running a cumulative group remembrance of Amanda. My eulogy appears there, among the many memories, in shortened, sanitized, and occasionally incomprehensible form. The full version follows...
