Never Far From Home

The night before I found out about Lisa’s death, I had been reading Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf. At the climax of the novel, the protagonist, Clarissa, finds out about the death of a young man she doesn’t know in the middle of her party. Clarissa is overwhelmed by emotion- she is angry that her friends would bring death to her party, empathetic toward the young man, and moved with sadness at the loss of life. Twenty-four hours after finishing book, in the weird way life seems to mirror the books that we read, I found myself, just like Clarissa, overwhelmed with emotion over the death of someone I didn’t know.

I was getting ready for bed when Sister Mary’s email arrived. It said only that there was a mandatory meeting in McGlinn that night regarding one of the residents. I immediately started fearing for the worst. I slipped into a panic.What had happened? Were my friends okay? I frantically started texting my McG friends who were both at Notre Dame and abroad, seeing if they knew what was going on. I even searched through Yik Yak to see if there was a hint as to what was happening. All at once the reality of being away from McGlinn hit me. Here, I knew that my beautiful community, my home away from home, had been hurt in some way, but I was too far away to know what was going on.

I eventually fell asleep before I could find out the news and I awoke to my phone dinging early in the morning. I held my breath as I read through my email. I was flooded with sadness to see that the worst had happened, a young woman from McGlinn, Lisa Yang, had died. I had never met Lisa, yet I felt so flooded by sadness. I was so sad that death had touched the McGlinn community, a place so close to me. I was angry too. Upset, not unlike Clarissa, that death and sadness had entered my joyful experience in Paris. I was so frustrated that I was far away from McGlinn. I wanted to be there to hold my friends as they cried and grieve with them. I wanted to hear their stories about my fellow shamrock that I will never meet.

I felt silly being so affected by the death of someone I didn’t know. Shouldn’t I be able to move past this easily? But in the two weeks that followed Lisa’s death, I felt haunted by sadness. It was as if this loss was following me around like a shadow. I felt guilty and selfish, as if I had no right to be sad. I hadn’t known her. But yet here I was, just like Clarissa, overcome with emotion for a stranger’s death. The novel ends with Clarissa seeing an old woman from a window, accepting her own death and aging, and finding the courage to keep living.

But my story is not Mrs. Dalloway. Instead of being written by Virginia Woolf, my own story is written by God himself. And because of this it doesn’t end there. Because with God, we believe in a world beyond death. We believe that we won’t just continue living here on earth, but in a world beyond this earth. We believe that one day we will be united in Heaven with those we love. We believe in Christ that sacrificed himself and through this sacrifice we are all connected: from Paris, to McGlinn, to a perfect paradise that is beyond what we on earth can even fathom. Through this, despite the miles that separate us, we are joined together by a love that can traverse even death itself. It has only been through prayer and meditation that I was finally able to let go of the shadow of darkness that followed me. My story doesn’t end here, but neither does Lisa’s, or anyone we’ve lost, because we have, waiting for us, a God with open arms ready to hug us and welcome us home. And until then, we have a God whose love is crisis crossing the world, joining us together, and reminding us we are never far from those we love.