All of us, in this post-modern world have so many people who are members of our lives. Some are people we know, others are people we grew up with, and others are people we "know" from movies and TV. In addition, we have two other categories we lump people into who have touched our lives: those who are alive and those who are dead. When any of these people dies, it affects us.
Just last weekend, I learned to my great sorrow that one of my favorite young actresses, Adrienne Shelley, had died. She was one of the people I occasionally scanned for in the Internet Movie Database, to see if she'd done anything new that sounded interesting. She also wrote, produced, did stage productions, and devoted part of her time to helping aspiring actors.
It didn't help that she was murdered. If she'd died, like Jim Hansen, of some disease, I'd still be sad, but sometimes people do get sick and die of their illnesses. Likewise, if she'd died in a car wreck, I'd hope she'd died quickly and suffered little. But this was not a death like those. She'd been working in the apartment she used as an office. There was some construction going on in the apartment immediately below hers and she went down to complain about the noise. She had an altercation with a young man who was doing the work. He has said that there were angry words spoken, she slapped his face and he "punched her out." Then, fearing that he'd killed her, he took her body upstairs to her apartment and hung her from her shower curtain rod around the neck with a bed sheet to simulate a suicide. That is where her husband found her, several hours later.
There is nothing but tragedy in this story. Why did she confront him? She was a native New Yorker - perhaps she thought he was, too - many Latinos are. New Yorkers argue all the time. It's not like Minneapolis or Seattle, where people would put "Please" prominently on the card they slipped under the door. In New York, you get in their face amd make it known what you want. He didn't understand and he was scared of being deported, since he was in the country illegally. He worked long, hard hours to send money back to his family in Ecuador. He was not a man without compassion or remorse. And now he's going to write his own tragedy as he lives out the rest of his life in jail - all for one stupid, senseless act.
Ms. Shelly was one of the people I'd put on my fictional dinner party list. She's someone you'd assume would have something interesting to say, about just about any topic that happened into the conversation. I met her once, complimented her on her work, she said "thanks." It was a very busy place and nothing would surprise me more than if she had the slightest recollection of having met me. Guess that makes me a fan. So be it. She's joined the ranks of Kathryn Hepburn, Spencer Tracy, George Harrison, Sandy Dennis, James Herriot, and a host of others whom I missed getting to know.
They say that when the death of a person matters to you, you ought to do something about something that mattered to them. If I were a person of wealth and consequence, I might have some hope of doing something like that, but I'm just an ordinary person. It makes me sad that some other ordinary person wasn't there to say "Hey, what're you doing?" when their altercation started to become physical. It wouldn't have been me. I haven't been in New York in thirty years and have no reason to go there. I am reminded of the time, more than twenty years ago now, when my wife and I were in San Francisco and happened to see some young men beating up another young man. My English wife ran down the street toward the affray, yelling at them to stop beating him up. I ran behind her, with my American don't-get-involved reluctance tugging at me. They all ran away and nothing happened. What would have happened if we'd just turned away? Could the boy on the ground getting kicked have pulled a knife and killed one of those other boys? I'll never know, but I was proud of my wife and ashamed at my own reluctance to intervene in something that was so obviously wrong.
I suppose that's the only way I can do something to honor Ms. Shelley's memory - to keep my eyes and ears open and to fail to turn away. It may never happen that I'll have an occasion to make a difference such as would have saved her life and returned her to her husband and three year old daughter, but in her memory I'll not turn away if it does.
