This morning, I woke to, quite possibly, the saddest news I had ever heard. My mother sat down on my bed and told me there had been a plane crash in Russia, and the Polish President, my president, was dead. They had crashed in the trees on the way to commemorate tthe 70th anniversary of the Katyń Massacre, where over 22,000 Polish officers, intellectuals and soldiers were brutally murdered by Soviet secret police. There was a lot of fog, my mom said, and everyone was dead.
My mom had been up since 4am, when she received a text message from my aunt in Poland. In Polish school, we had a mass to honor them. But I'll never forget, on the way to school, we were listening to the radio, my mother and brother and I. And when they mentioned that Wojciech Seweryn, a Pole from Chicago, also perished in the crash, my mother gasped. She appeared so helpless, so shaken, and I hadn't ever seen her like this. What is death to change us this way? Why do we humans grieve, why don't we just allow deaths to pass by like other animals, like the pigeons I see on the roadside? They don't seem to care for the dead ones, crushed under our wheels? They don't even learn from their fallen comrades. I saw one pigeon, alone, in the debris of the roadside, half in the sun. It seemed like it matched the way this day has been so far, yet it kept hope, it was there, alive.
I was speechless nearly the whole day, and although I probably appeared not too shaken, not too bothered, in reality I was. I could hardly hold back tears. I thought, as I looked through the window at the beatiful bright blue sky, this can't be. How can this happen, and the world still remain like this: beautiful, unshaken, glorious? It reminded me how fragile life is, how much like a helpless flower that can be trampled at any time.
I thought about how ironic this tradegy was. It truly is, in a way that is hard to explain.
I was reminded of a similar Saturday, almost exactly 5 years ago. The day Pope John Paul II died. I was too young to truly comprehend what happened, and I didn't feel the sadness I feel now. But that Saturday, too, was a week after Easter. That Saturday was horribly sad.
I know, that in 20, 40, 50 years, I'll be able to remember this day as I remember the day the Pope died, as I remember the day my grandfather died of cancer. For some reason, my grandfather's death doesn't seem as horrible, as cut from the world, as this horrible accident. It was his time to go, he was elderly and sick with cancer. I just wish I could have seen him again before he died. But he lived in Poland, so I couldn't.
