Tragedy at Company X
Today, many of my dearest friends with whom I’ve shared more than 13 years are gathered not around a yule log as they should be but around a casket in deep mourning over the loss of a fellow co-worker that had I remained with Company X would have worked for. She was shot in the neck last week by her estranged husband who, having felt his maniacal control over her slipping away murdered her and a co-worker in her home in Florida.
http://www2.tbo.com/content/2008/dec/21/212034/estranged-husband-questioned-gulfport-deaths/
That I didn’t know Elizabeth Evans or Gerald Taylor doesn’t make what happened to them any less shocking… I don’t feel any of the sadness but accutetly feel the senselessness. The monster who pulled the trigger, having so little respect for human life didn’t turn the gun on himself but instead will put their respective families through a trial, through the appeals process and legal wrangelings associated with keeping this rat bastard off of death row.
Somewhere in Florida sits this woman’s child, an 18 -year daughter whose grief I cannot begin to imagine. I think of my friends in Florida right now, of Annapolis in particular who flew there from Baltimore last night and I don’t think I can put into words how I would feel if something happened to rip her away from me or the thousands of people who love her as I do.
And yet… Annapolis, as well as any of my closest friends can attest, in the 3 years since my divorce and up until very recently, I wished my former husband dead. Dead… in the loosest imagineable constructs of what it means to not exist anymore. I never for a moment thought that I was capable of killing him, only that the scope of my pain and the betrayal was so enormous that yes, I did wish him dead, a thought that sickens me now.
When our hearts are hurting, it’s difficult to imagine that even the deepest sadness is transient. We will know joy again. We will feel hope. We will understand love. But it is in those dark times, darkness that I think most people have faced (except for Mr. and Mrs. Quantico to whom not a dark day seems to have passed in all the years I’ve known them) that for some is so consuming that it is to the exclusion of anything else. All the other options and ways to cope slip away at an expense too great to calculate: the taking of a life.
Working for Company X shaped me in ways that I am grateful for and gave me friendships that I’ll hold in my heart forever. My prayers are with each of you as you muddle through the loss you face today and always.
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