I never met Daniel, but I am still crying two weeks after the night he died. He graduated from Amherst College that week and was home on Long Island relaxing and preparing to move into the city. While driving home from the grocery store on a Wednesday afternoon, he was hit by a bus. It’s the thing we all joke about, you know? You never know when you’re going to get hit by a bus and …
I never met Daniel, so I only know him through my best friend, Allison. She called me from Long Island to tell me her friend from high school was in the hospital. Hit by a bus and … and I was the only person he ever really talked to, you know? He was in a coma and the doctors didn’t know if he would ever wake up. Allison went to see him and almost regretted it. His parents asked me why this happened-like I know. I know they wanted me to bring up God, but I wouldn’t.
When she got home, Allison called to tell me how Daniel took a semester off of college to regroup and that he cried a lot with her on the telephone. She told me he was misunderstood in high school, that no one cared to get to know him and that even she took him for granted. He didn’t seem to love life and was still searching.
I remembered a picture of him from high school that Allison had shown me. Everyone looked awkward in their rented tuxes and greasy hair gel, or expensive gowns and caked-on make-up, but Daniel looked natural-relaxed and grinning. He looked happy standing next to Allison, one of the only people he ever trusted. I wonder what was really going on in his head, and how fake that smile was.
Three days after the accident, I was standing next to Allison when she found out Daniel had died. He didn’t wake up, she said. I watched as she became silent, coping as a sudden madness overtook her. I knew there was nothing I could do besides sit with her and let that madness overtake me, too. Death connects unrelated people sometimes, and I felt connected to Daniel then. Not only because I befriended Allison as he had, but because I had had my own accident four long years ago.
Sitting with Allison, memories of my own tragedy rushed back: I remembered being strapped down to a hospital bed, lights dimmed, contraptions beeping. The sedatives wearing off, exposing a feeling a disconnect-like helplessness running through the I.V. needle. No pain, just an overwhelming ache. I remember waking up and not being able to stop lurching. My dad noticed my eyes opening and placed his hand on my shoulder to steady me. My mom hovered in the corner, smiling her half-frown, yearning to come closer but unable to. It’ll be okay, Robert.
But I remembered why it might not be okay: swearing, bracing, smashing, screaming, freezing, freezing, freezing, asking what happened what happened what happened, rushing to the hospital, overhearing whispers, hearing my bones crunch, thinking I can take the pain, doctor, just fix me, screaming in terror and thinking thank you as the nurse told me it was time to be knocked out for surgery. (They told me later that people all the way on the other side of the hospital heard that terrified scream.) And I remember waking up not knowing if I would ever be all right and thinking maybe in two years I’ll look back and laugh.
I never met Daniel, so I don’t know what was going through his mind as he lay on that hospital bed. I imagine he felt something like I did-disjointed, hopeless. I live with the residue of that feeling, but it doesn’t pull me down. Instead, it’s the feeling that keeps me alive, linked to a moment of uncertainty when hope did not exist. That feeling pushes me toward life, out of a cycle of despair that I, and seems like Daniel, was stuck in before the accident. But Daniel died within that grasp of hopelessness. He, and those who loved him, will never be able to escape it.
Catastrophe had a certain feeling. I like to think that those of us who’ve felt it, know it. But not all of us survive to remember, and that’s why I’m still crying two weeks after Daniel died. I’m crying for Daniel, but I’m also crying for myself.
Rob Anderson is a junior in the College and news editor of The Georgetown Voice. He wants you to notice he didn’t swear in this piece.
