Anniversary
A year ago, I was days away from completing the first semester of J-school. I had one exam to take, but my main focus was the final assignment for Reporting & Writing I, the core class of the fall semester.
That assignment, which our professor called "The Convergence of Two Lives," required each of us to write a story about two people whose lives intersected in the instant in which one died at the hands of the other. It was an inordinately difficult assignment, both reportorially and emotionally. We had to first find a recent murder case that fit the parameters and then reconstruct what happened from both the killer's and victim's points of view.
My case involved two residents of the same housing project in a crime-ridden part of Brooklyn. While one was involved in a shootout with rivals in the courtyard of the housing complex, the other was in her bedroom, watching the Giants-Eagles game with family members. After a call had gone against the Giants, she turned from the TV in disgust, just in time for a stray bullet to crash through the bedroom window and pierce her skull.
I spent an evening interviewing the victim's family members in the same housing project, in the same apartment, in which she'd been killed. I spoke to her mother, two of her sisters, her fiancé, and her son, and I was amazed at the grace with which they invited me into their home, recounted the story of the murder, and answered my many questions.
I don't know how one makes sense of the stray bullet that ends the life of a 28-year-old, especially when she is your mother, daughter, sister, or bride-to-be. I don't know how a family can live through that horror—perpetrated in their own home—and find any kind of peace. But this family did.
The day after I met them—exactly a year ago—I found out that I had breast cancer for the second time.
I could not make sense of it. I did not exhibit grace. Mostly I just fell apart.
But I did finish my convergence story, even though my professor told me to forget about it. And I finished it on deadline. I owed it to that woman, to her family, and to myself. Writing that story in the midst of my re-diagnosis gave me perspective I could not otherwise have found during those difficult days.
Breast cancer is a stray bullet of its own, and I've been hit twice.
Each time, I've been wounded—deeply. But in some sense, I've only been grazed.
I've been able to get up.
I've been able to go on.
And I've been able to tell my own story.
That assignment, which our professor called "The Convergence of Two Lives," required each of us to write a story about two people whose lives intersected in the instant in which one died at the hands of the other. It was an inordinately difficult assignment, both reportorially and emotionally. We had to first find a recent murder case that fit the parameters and then reconstruct what happened from both the killer's and victim's points of view.
My case involved two residents of the same housing project in a crime-ridden part of Brooklyn. While one was involved in a shootout with rivals in the courtyard of the housing complex, the other was in her bedroom, watching the Giants-Eagles game with family members. After a call had gone against the Giants, she turned from the TV in disgust, just in time for a stray bullet to crash through the bedroom window and pierce her skull.
I spent an evening interviewing the victim's family members in the same housing project, in the same apartment, in which she'd been killed. I spoke to her mother, two of her sisters, her fiancé, and her son, and I was amazed at the grace with which they invited me into their home, recounted the story of the murder, and answered my many questions.
I don't know how one makes sense of the stray bullet that ends the life of a 28-year-old, especially when she is your mother, daughter, sister, or bride-to-be. I don't know how a family can live through that horror—perpetrated in their own home—and find any kind of peace. But this family did.
The day after I met them—exactly a year ago—I found out that I had breast cancer for the second time.
I could not make sense of it. I did not exhibit grace. Mostly I just fell apart.
But I did finish my convergence story, even though my professor told me to forget about it. And I finished it on deadline. I owed it to that woman, to her family, and to myself. Writing that story in the midst of my re-diagnosis gave me perspective I could not otherwise have found during those difficult days.
Breast cancer is a stray bullet of its own, and I've been hit twice.
Each time, I've been wounded—deeply. But in some sense, I've only been grazed.
I've been able to get up.
I've been able to go on.
And I've been able to tell my own story.
posted by Jody Rosen Knower at 6:41 PM
3 Comments:
Brava!
Wow. I am struck by the paradox of your bad fortune to have been hit twice as you said, and your good fortune to have come across that story at that time, which enabled you to be outside of yourself and get perepctive at such an overwhelmingly painful time.
And I am struck with the beauty and grace with which you have wrotten about it a year later. brava, indeed.
Here's to all of your future anniversaries....and the all the chances you'll have to write something this poignant and relevant on each one of them. Ti amo.
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