The Bloody Flag of Life

The Day. Derby Day is the Kentucky version of Super Bowl Sunday. Everybody gathers for parties whether they care about horse racing or not. Mrs. RSI and I got together with five or six other couples and our kids for a Derby Day party even though nobody in the group has followed horse racing in years. We talked shop talk, kids, politics, and culture for a couple of hours, watched the race, then talked for a couple more hours after we forgot the race.

The Shadow. It was a good day. The scientists in our group were still celebrating the removal of their chair earlier in the week and everyone was happy for them. I had a hard time working up a lot of enthusiasm though because I had heard that something about the death of Janet Gabriel last week that was extremely disturbing. Mrs. RSI told me that Janet was pinned under a lawn tractor for five hours before her husband reached her. As well as I thought of Janet, it was disorienting to think of 800-900 pounds of equipment pressing down on her torso and killing her over such a long time. She was still conscious when her husband got there and told him that she knew she was dying. In fact, the only thing keeping Janet alive at that point was the weight of the tractor itself which was acting as a tourniquet on her internal injuries. As soon as the tractor was removed, massive internal bleeding began and she quickly fell into a coma.

One of the things that's lost in all the reports of human deaths is just how much force it takes to kill a person. In Janet Gabriel's case, I can't help but think of the horrible trauma she went through. At the same time, it's important to emphasize that it took so much to kill Janet because she had enormous vitality, a vitality that I want to defiantly reaffirm in myself when I think of her. When I hear of people I know dying, I often feel a surge of defiant energy in the thought that I want to fuck everything and have another 5,000 children just to show how alive we human beings really are.

I feel just as defiant about Janet Gabriel's death. Yes, Janet died even though she was bright, energetic, friendly, and in tremendous physical condition as a marathon runner. And it's a horrible thing. But damn it, I'd like to think it would take just as much to kill me as it took to kill her. Although death is the inevitable consequence of what the philosopher Hannah Arendt called our "natality," I'll wave the bloody flag of life as long as I can. Just like Janet Gabriel.

In this way, Janet Gabriel's death, and the ferociousness of my own reaction to learning some of the details, hung like a shadow over the day.