...from Becoming Maren
by Africa Fine
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When my mother was killed, no one really had much to say to me. If she had died from, say, cancer or in a
freak construction accident, well, there's plenty to say about that, although I can imagine none of it is
especially comforting. You never know about these things. It's God's will. She'll always be with you in spirit.
But when people found out my mother was killed by a drunk driver, a man who'd injured others and himself
before only to sit behind the wheel once again the day my mother died, their faces froze into grotesque
masks of sympathy while their brains shuffled through the old stock phrases. Death is always “God's will,”
assuming you believe in God, and it's true, you never can predict when death is on its way. But somehow,
when faced with a death like this, these sentiments seemed just a little off, because they didn't address the
fact that the whole thing was someone's fault, a direct cause and effect that was neither random nor
inevitable. So when I told people how my mother was killed, they just stood there and looked at me, trying
not to show their pity.
prison that looked on television reports like a slightly ominous public school, and the horror of the situation
begins to repel friends and even family. The injustice of trading a few years of his life for the rest my mother's
was unfathomable, and eventually, the well-wishers and sympathizers stopped calling and visiting,
determined to avoid the sadness I could not escape. For a long time afterwards, I told people my mother
had died in her sleep of a terrible aneurysm that could not have been predicted. It made them, and me,
feel better.
Lots of times, when people tell about a devastating event in their lives, something that took them totally by
surprise, they talk about how they'd been having a great day, then boom - everything changed. But that
seems too convenient, maybe the result of a mixture of grief, hindsight and fear of the uncontrollable.
Because I was having a terrible day when my mother died, and while I can't say that I had a premonition, a
strange feeling or a sharp pain at the moment of her death, I was embroiled in the all-consuming trivialities
of being fifteen.
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africa fine
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| excerpt: becoming maren |
| Katrina 2001 |
| Becoming Maren 2003 |
| Looking for Lily 2008 |
| Save Me 2009 |
| Swan 2010 |