LINER NOTES
A separateness or division exists among many people these days, due to differing opinions, perspectives, ideologies and political stances.
What I find people often forget in these moments of political discourse and differences are the human experiences we all share — the ones we all know too well that make us more alike than we usually consider.
While I could write this column about the new, additional things I’ve learned about the community over the last week, I think it would be more beneficial, maybe, to write about something that happened to me personally — something that at one time or another happens to all of us.
This is about to get a bit sad, but please bear with me — I have a point, I promise.
On Wednesday, I learned that a close friend of mine died suddenly at age 34. His name was Quentin Q.
Bynum, though we all called him “QB” since middle school. We grew up in the same small town in Arkansas and spent numerous hours of our lives together, in school, after-school and on weekends, trying to rid ourselves of the boredom of small-town life as angsty teens who listened to music too loud while driving around on back roads.
After high school, I moved away, but we always kept in touch. In fact, he messaged me just days ago to catch up and ask when I’d be visiting home again. If only I had known this would be our last conversation, I likely would have shared more, spent more time catching up and telling him how much our friendship has meant to me throughout my life. … But you can’t know these things.
“So, it goes …” as Kurt Vonnegut Jr. would have said.
This is not the first time I have lost someone. It’s not even the first close friend I have lost, but it is something most people have experienced. I recently watched as the community mourned the sudden loss of Taylor native Avery Koonce, who was only 19 when she was found dead in her dorm room at the United States Air Force Academy. Taylor Press receives obituaries on most days, and it is never lost on me how many people are affected by those passings.
Death not only makes us come face to face with our own mortality, but shifts our perspective about life and the world — every single time, as Joan Didion so eloquently explained in her 2005 memoir “The Year of Magical Thinking.”
Didion wrote the memoir after her husband, writer John Gregory Dunne, died in December 2003.
“People who have recently lost someone have a certain look, recognizable maybe only to those who have seen that look on their own faces,” Didion wrote. “I have noticed it on my face and I notice it now on others. The look is one of extreme vulnerability, nakedness, openness.”
All of this is to say, many people you meet or interact with have also suffered from loss, just as you.
So the next time you are in a heated discussion over differences of opinion, politics or anything else, remember that, though these things may be important to us, we are speaking with another human — just like us, who has experienced loss, intermittent waves of grief and heartache.
We can choose to be kind. We can choose to be open-minded. We can choose to agree to disagree. We can live and let live, and move on.
We can know that we are more alike than we often recognize, as we all suffer the same agony and anguish when we lose someone we love.
And anyone who has experienced it can tell you, it never truly goes away.
Kelley is the area editor for the Centex Group, which includes the Taylor Press and Elgin Courier.
