2012 -- Fin

It's been a long, complicated, transitional year.



This was the year in which I embarked on the lengthy transition between recognized American adulthood (age 18) and empowered American adulthood (age 21). As a result of the dissonance between these two phases, it doesn't feel as if much has changed. Maybe those will be more apparent next year.

I graduated from high school and went to college out of state. I'll readily admit that this was terrifying, but I made friends and pulled through and actually quite like the increased independence angle of college life; it hints at just how awesome being an empowered American adult will be. Plus, learning! Learning is rad.

While these things are largely positive, they're also to an extent expected from life. I started this post with them because I feel like I should remember that they still count for something, that they have meaning, that this year wasn't as horrible as it has sometimes felt. I've been trying to write about what follows for some weeks, but haven't quite had the words. This is because, even now, the number of tragedies that occurred this year seems surreal, impossible. They shouldn't. Bad things happen all the time, all over the world. It's just that, well, we all reach a point where the concept of death becomes concrete, and this year, it was my turn.

Spread throughout the year were a series of ugly, ugly deaths that had a more profound effect on me than most previous cases had. I'd rather not list them all off; you probably are familiar with many of them and can guess at the rest. Some were local, others were hailed as national tragedies. Some were accidents, others most certainly were not. I knew three of the local people who were killed this year, either by their own hands or by another's. Those were the hardest to face. Two of them were parents of one of my brother's friend; their deaths set the tone for the year. The third was a former classmate who threw himself in front of a train.

Looking back, that was the death that broke down the last lingering shreds of insulation, of abstraction for me. It wasn't the man who killed his ex-wife and then himself, leaving his children orphaned. It wasn't the young man who killed his father and put his mother into critical condition. It wasn't even the event in Aurora that made movie theaters a place where fear couldn't be entirely dispelled as make-believe because, after all, a dozen people were killed. No, those deaths were horrible, but there was still some distance, some space between them and me. The former classmate, though? The idea that someone my age really could commit suicide had never truly sunk in until that moment. Somehow, despite all the PSAs we sat through in health class, despite all the stories on the news, young people killing themselves remained firmly in the mental category of "things that happen to other people." That stopped once he died. That's when death became real, became possible.

It took some time for this to really settle in my mind, but by then, something worse had happened, which made the shock even worse. Specifically, about a month or so later, Sandy Hook happened. From the moment I read the terse news report, I was painfully, sharply aware of the fact that people had died horrible, senseless deaths. It was a feeling that I couldn't ignore, and it grew, building itself up with the deaths of other people for whom I had not truly grieved. The emotional shockwave left me unable to do much more than cry and grieve and pray.

That's how I knew then, as I know now, that I can't regard death at as great a distance as I once did. It's a concrete reality, a part of life, one that we can't escape. It's a hard realization, made perhaps worse when I remember that many people reach it sooner in life than I have. Still, by fully comprehending that death can strike down anyone, I feel as if I'm more prepared for the life ahead of me. This, then, proved to be the greatest transition for me this year. It has been a difficult one, certainly, but it's important, necessary, even. Empathy can be painful, but without it, how can you care about others?

I don't really give thought to New Year's resolutions. To be perfectly honest, the very concept of the year 2013 is somehow mind-boggling. It's not that I bought into the whole Mayan calendar silliness, nothing like that. It's probably just that this age, this time in my life, has been one that I've built towards since I was in grade school. Now that I've reached the summit, it's hard to know what to do next.

The best answer? Climb a new mountain.