In the time of your life, live—so that in that wondrous time you shall not add to the misery and sorrow of the world, but shall smile to the infinite delight and mystery of it.
– William Saroyan, “The Time of Your Life”
Your task is not to foresee the future, but to enable it.
– Antoine de Saint Exupéry, “The Wisdom of the Sands”
Life is always and forever a fragile thing, delicate and beautiful and transient. Long as the days and weeks can sometimes seem, the months and years slip by at a seemingly increasing pace, especially as we ourselves get older. You’d think we’d know this well enough by now – that the days are shorter than we think – but we still get reminders, far too often, of how brief our time here really is.
Over the recent Easter weekend, one of my coworkers was killed. She was shot in the head in the living room of her family’s home in south Texas while visiting for the holiday. Her name was Valerie (Valeria to her family and Spanish-speaking friends), and she was 27 years old. We had just celebrated her birthday with her a few weeks earlier, joking around with her about “classic” ’80s movies that she had never seen or even heard of, sharing strawberry cream pie in our department conference room, and wishing her happiness and success in the year to come.
And then, the news.
Details are still coming out in the investigation, but it appears to have been a burglary turned tragic. There’s no evidence that the suspect – who has a long criminal history and was, thankfully, apprehended the very next day – knew Valerie, or that her killing was in any way personally motivated.
It was, in other words, nothing more than another senseless act of violence, the kind we hear about every day in cities the world over, but which have a strange way of washing over us, leaving us unsettled and slightly numb but without usually hitting too deep. In some ways, it’s a sensible defense mechanism, an adaptation to the insane rate of information flow in our modern world. After all, what would we do with all the sorrow and all the grief of all the people in the world? Who among us can carry such a load?
But it’s different when the violence hits somewhere closer to home, when it crosses the immediate threshold of your own life and impacts the people you know, the people you care about, the people you spend your days around – whose sudden absence cannot help but be noticed and deeply felt.
In my day job, I work in a relatively small communications department – a dozen or so people with whom I spend my time collaborating on projects of all shapes and sizes. We’re all artists of one stripe or another, all creative folks who love a good story and finding ways to share it with others. We work hard, and as in many workplaces today, we often spend more of our waking hours around each other than around our loved ones and family at home.
This has a way of making the people at work feel a bit like family. And so, in losing Valerie, we feel like we’ve lost more than a colleague or a coworker, but a member of our frequently funny, sometimes-strange, and often-endearing little office family. It’s devastating, and it’s absolutely heartbreaking. And I can’t even imagine what those who knew her best – especially her family – must be going through.
Valerie had the passion and the excitement of youth. She always seemed to possess an innocent hopefulness and an enduring optimism, both about her own life and the world around her. Her sense of humor persisted even on difficult days. I suspect that it’s good to be around people like that, people who are quick to laugh and who remind us, in Abraham Lincoln’s words, of “the better angels of our nature.”
It’s tempting now, in the aftermath, to keep poring over news reports, looking for clues and information that will help us make sense of the senselessness of her death. It’s tempting to examine the criminal history of the man suspected of killing her, to look at his record of charges and convictions and parole board hearings and wonder why he was out on the streets and able to commit such a heinous act. It’s tempting to “take it to the Lord in prayer,” as the song says, and ask God why in the name of heaven such atrocities are allowed to happen – why the young, who have so much living left to do, are allowed to be taken so cruelly from their families and their own unfolding lives. It’s tempting to ask God what on earth this could mean about life and our being here at all.
I’ve given in to all of these temptations over the past couple of weeks, and I’m sure I’m not done yet. I’ll keep checking for updated news stories. I’ll keep on being angry at someone who could do such a thing without so much as a second thought or – seemingly – an ounce of mercy. And I’ll keep on asking God what kind of world this is we live in, one that so often makes so little sense to me.
But I plan on doing something else, too. In the two years since my mom passed away, I’ve discovered the importance of keeping her story alive, and to consider, as often as I can, the ripple effect that her life had and that it continues to have. I think Valerie deserves the same. Because her story is much too good to end now.
Valerie was with our team less than a year, but she was a bright, vibrant soul, and she carried that brightness with her, sharing it with the people she met along her way. We were lucky to have known her and blessed to have had her pass through our lives, even if only for a brief season.
We grieve for her family – her parents and grandparents and siblings and cousins – who have lost more than we can really fathom. Somewhere in the deep interconnectedness of all that is, our sorrows mingle together and join in with all those sorrows of all the people in all the world.
Because of course, in the end, we were never really unaffected by those far-away tragedies we read about in the news. Every candle extinguished before its time only hastens the encroaching darkness, and each of us who remain has to take up some portion of that flame and try our best to burn a little bit brighter, even if it’s only in our own little corner of the world. We do this in remembrance of those we’ve lost, and we do it to bring just a little bit more warmth and light and love and joy into the world we now inhabit without them. Until we get those long-sought answers – until we have some sense of the “why” behind all that is and all that happens – we have the choice, each day, either to use our lives to illuminate the world or to shrivel and hide in darkness and fear.
It makes me think of a line from “Holy the Firm” by Annie Dillard:
There is no such thing as an artist: there is only the world lit or unlit as the light allows. When the candle is burning, who looks at the wick? When the candle is out, who needs it?
Valerie’s candle was extinguished before the world could fully know what wonders her life might have illuminated and brought into being. It’s horrible, and it’s not fair. But we can still take inspiration from her life – from how she lived and moved and had her being. We can still find meaning and message in the joy and the laughter she spread, or in the way her curious mind took in the world all around her.
Her candle may be out now, but she’s still with us (how could she not be?), and her life still has meaning. Her story still carries on in new threads and new tales, taken up and carried forward by all those whose lives she touched. It’s up to us now to take up the threads, to tell the stories.
An essay like this could be written, I suppose, about almost any life. Each one is so particular, so unique. It hasn’t been lost on me that, at almost the same time that Valerie was being shot and killed so senselessly in her family’s living room in south Texas, across the globe in Sri Lanka several hundred people were dying in a series of Easter morning bombings, with many of the bombs targeting churchgoers celebrating the resurrection of a risen savior who had “trampled down death by death.” Surely those hundreds of lives halfway across the globe deserve to be memorialized, too, each one in particular.
But I don’t know if my little light can shine that far – far enough to illumine the darkness and the sorrow that those families half a world away must surely feel as they mourn their loved ones lost in a moment of unbelievable violence and terror. Sometimes, maybe, you have to start by shining a light on the world you can see right in front of you with your own two eyes. Maybe that was part of Valerie’s message to us, a part of her legacy that I can take up and carry on with me as I wind on down the road.
We can’t be afraid to start shining wherever we may be today, right now, this very moment, in whatever little ways we’re able. Because the alternative is to live small lives shrouded in fear, hatred, anxiety, and loneliness – which, in the end, is really no kind of living at all. But if instead we start with love and joy and practice, practice, practice, then maybe – maybe someday – our love and our light might just be big enough to reach half a world away. Or even to encompass the whole universe, to illuminate everything that is and was and will be.
Less than a week before she was killed, Valerie had put a quote on the small whiteboard by her office door. It was by Antoine de Saint Exupéry, from the opening dedication to his wonderful book “The Little Prince,” and it’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot in the days since we received the sad news. The quote reads:
All grown-ups were once children, but only a few of them remember it.
Valerie helped us remember. And for that, I’m grateful.
Photo Credit: Leigh Kendell on Unsplash