For the second time during my year abroad in Taiwan, tragedy has struck painfully close to home. I’m not talking about a death in the family (though that has happened too), I’m talking about the kind of tragedy that makes international headlines, that captures the front page of the New York Times, that sets Twitter abuzz with Tweets.
First it was the Mumbai attacks.
Woken at three in the morning by a text message from my mother, I came out of my bedroom to the living room, turned on CNN, and watched for the next three hours as heart-breaking images of a city I loved go up in flames and turned into a war zone, and sobbed and shook as I learned that my uncle had been killed in the line of duty.
The agony was prolonged, of course, as each time over the next three days that I sat down in front of the television, the siege was still ongoing, it’s final toll unknown, the gun battles still raging in the corridors of the majestic Taj hotel. I felt broken and helpless watching this senseless violation of spaces I frequent whenever I visit, felt panicked at the thought of just how lucky fate can be sometimes, that people I loved were not in those places when they so easily could have been.
The experience was a horrible one, and I had hoped that I would never have to go through something like that again. Except on Thursday morning, I woke up and checked my email before leaving the house as I always do, only to find that a student at Wesleyan, my alma mater, had been murdered in cold blood in the middle of our campus bookstore.
Once again, the feelings of helplessness, fear, and that sick feeling in my stomach returned. This was another place that I loved, another place so achingly familiar to me as I watched the news footage online that I knew all the surrounding buildings, streets, recognized the cherry trees in bloom, another place shattered by an act of senseless violence.
The attack at Wesleyan sent shockwaves throughout the alumni community in this virtual age, with Facebook status updates, online away messages, Twitter and LiveJournal all affording a virtual venue to express our collective shock. I can only imagine what the atmosphere on campus is like today, and it breaks my heart.
I did not know Johanna, but the horrific nature of her death and the sense of violation is enough to shake me to the core. Reading that her killer, Stephen Morgan, had potentially planned a shooting spree on campus on a day where hundreds of students would have been easy targets sitting on Foss Hill during Spring Fling made chills run down my spine.
Wesleyan will heal, just as Bombay has begun to heal, but the scars will likely remain, though perhaps Wesleyan will have an advantage. College populations, unlike the landmarks and residents of a city, are a transient lot. Their memory is short-term, limited to four-year stretches of time. Those who are on campus right now will, undoubtedly, remember the events of Thursday for years to come. Those who come after will not know, and so maybe healing is a possible goal, but for me, as an alum, the memory of a place I love and the knowledge that it was destroyed will never fade.
