Column:

Remembering Tracy Fisher

By Lindsay Eanet

Published Oct. 23, 2009

There's this great short story by Kurt Vonnegut called "The Manned Missiles" in which two fathers — one American, one Soviet — correspond and comfort one another after both of their sons are killed in a failed space mission. Despite their conventional wisdom/Cold War-era position as each other's enemies, the two find empathy from experience and are able to be a source of comfort for one another.

There is a refrain Vonnegut uses several times in the story, the phrase "I grasp your hand," used at the beginning as a broken English greeting, but taking on a far different meaning at the end of the story.

Tuesday night, as I watched members of my community come together to honor the memory of freshman Tracy Fisher, I think I finally began to understand what Vonnegut meant.

This isn't the column I thought I would be writing this week. I was reluctant to write it for a number of reasons, most notably the gravity of the situation and fears of my inability to properly pay tribute in this space to such a vibrant and wonderful spirit who meant so much to so many people. But honestly, I've had difficulty focusing on anything else, so writing about something else when my heart and mind is somewhere completely different would have felt trite and disingenuous.

It's easy to use this space, these 550-odd words we are given every week, to point out differences among people, for political attacks or pontifications over power or privilege or who is screwing over whom. It's a lot easier to be divisive than to seek opportunities to unify, to remind ourselves of the fundamental things that make us human, the things we all feel and respond to in very much the same way, to recognize our standing as part of one giant community, one family.

At the memorial service, I was completely blown away by what I saw. Toward the end, when people were invited up to say a few words, the girl sitting next to me, a Hillel regular, an often quiet presence, approached the pulpit and spoke unwaveringly from the heart with aching sympathy for someone she only knew peripherally, but for whom she still felt the gravity of the loss. As she returned to her seat, face bright red and streaked with tears, she was greeted with comforting embraces and offers of thanks for speaking from the heart.

I know Tracy, a young woman I will remember as being warm and outgoing and greeting everyone with an open heart, would have done the same thing.

I am floored by our ability to exhibit compassion and empathy, even to those we barely know, though I wish this conclusion would have come from far brighter circumstances. But in the wake of something so unthinkably awful, I saw examples of humanity in its most honest and painfully beautiful form.

We could all learn to live a little bit more like Tracy, even those who did not know her well. To live and to treat people with warmth and compassion, to greet others with genuine exuberance, these are principles we can incorporate into every fiber of our existence.

Vonnegut was on to something. Even in the face of the direst aspects of the human condition, it is incredible what is accomplished when we break down barriers and kick divisions to the curb, to live as one community, one family, to heal and be re-lifted.