A Writer's Thoughts on Mortality

On 8-23-07, I was just returning from Detroit's Writers' Bequest conference, where I had conducted a workshop. I started out the last leg of my railroad train trip, from New Orleans to Los Angeles, feeling elated. (For those who don't cognize me, I love a cross state railroad train trip every couple of old age or so to take clip to reflect, to regroup, and to regenerate.) But why shouldn't I have got been?

I had made all my connexions with no jobs from L.A., to Detroit, then off the conquered path, to Memphis, then on to Capital Of Georgia in order to see my oldest son, (whom I hadn't seen in stopping point to two years,) then back to New Orleans to catch the criterion twelve noon railroad train back to L.A. All was right with the world, as the song goes.

Ten hours later, though, jaw wall hanging open, I looked on in discouragement and shock. Against a background of a Lone-Star State sky, a trigon of red, greenish and yellowish flashing lights, resembling a Christmastide tree, had interrupted our railroad train ride. However, this wasn't a happy, joyous occasion. I knew it was a tragedy.

Talk about a bipolar experience. I had zipped from happy and contented to upset and discombobulated within a substance of seconds. It all began around 10:30 p.m., after I'd close down my lap top and prepared to settle down down to sleep.

Bam! I jumped with a start at what sounded like a sonic boom. What was that? Next thing I know, I heard the most blood-curdling sounds that I never-ever hope to hear again in this life--that of the railroad train wheels' screaming and braking. This crashing noise pierced the air and seemed to travel on forever. The malodor of combustion metallic element filled the train. All types of ideas raced through my mind.

What was going on? Suddenly attendants, staff, and conductors, crisp looks on their faces, were running up the aisle to the presence of the train. They wouldn't state us what had happened for the first hour. I'm not certain if they knew. I was near the dorsum of the railroad train and in the curve, I realized we had skidded almost a statute mile from the guard rail.

Following the ruckus, I rushed up to the observatory where I watched police force force car, after police car, fire trucks, tow trucks, and coroner's autos hurtle through the nighttime like minor planets to the scene of the accident. We had hit a car. Unlike the dead deer, which we hit on the manner from Los Angeles, these were human beings. What would happen? Would the people live?

I didn't cognize if they would change our railroad train or what? I stayed awoke the whole time. Later, a police force came in our manager at 3:30 a.m. and being as I was the lone 1 awake, he asked if I saw anything. I told him what I heard, what I smelt. That's all Iodine could vouch for. By then, I had learned that apparently, three immature people, who drove around the barrier, were killed.

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/08/23/national/main3198118.shtml

We didn't travel on until 3:30 a.m. the adjacent morning. We were running six hours late,(of what would go an eight hr late reaching time,) astatine that point. We never changed trains. Later, I learned that we were 10 statute miles east of Houston when the accident took place. The adjacent twenty-four hours as Iodine watched the scenery of sage, brush, cactus, desert, yucca, plants, acacia trees, telephone set wires, and windmills reel by my window, all I heard was the whistle of death. The blood railroad railroad train is what I called this train. The wheels just kept moving on in malice of death, which is how life moves on. I just wished person would come up and procedure this with us, the manner they make at schools when calamities take place. Are this station traumatic disorder?

To procedure my feelings, I talked to different passengers. There had definitely been three fatalities. One rider postulated that in order for the music director to have got got missed the car, he would have had to leap the tracks, endangering the lives of the riders on board. The driver
of the doomed auto had made the pick to travel around the rail. The riders on the traindidn't do that pick and shouldn't have got to endure those effects of person else's erroneous choice. This didn't pacify my disturbed thoughts, but it made me think. Perhaps this is one of the quandaries of life: making a pick between the lesser of two evils. I wondered, in a lawsuit like this, make they change conductors? Or makes the same music director go on on that circuit of duty?

How make you dwell with taking a life--even if it's an accident? How make you happen redemption? I'm trying to do sense of this whole tragedy. Are this subsister guilt? Why them and not me? Don't acquire me wrong. I'm glad to be here.

When we stopped, later that afternoon, I took a image of the presence of the railroad train and saw that it was burned on the right side. Obviously, the auto that tested to beat out the railroad railroad train and was hit on the right side.

The manner that train kept rolling along, I thought of the metaphor of life. It just maintains going on after you die. I just have got to maintain going.

That adjacent day, it occurred to me.

Somewhere some parents were mourning. Perhaps college registrations had already taken
place, and lives ended abruptly, dangled in the spread like an unfinished map.

So what can we make as writers? We compose down the joys, the pains, the sorrows, the triumphs. For the adjacent generation, we go forth a map that we were here. In this manner we dwell on long after our death, kind of like Anne Frank did from her diary. It is how William Shakespeare captured human behaviour four hundred old age ago, which is just as true today.