A Writer's Thoughts on Mortality

A Writer’s Thoughts on Mortality

Dr. Maxine Thompson

On 8-22-07, I was just returning from Detroit’s Writers’ Legacy conference,
where I had conducted a workshop. I started out the last leg of my train trip, from
New Orleans to Los Angeles, feeling elated. (For those who don’t know me, I love a cross country train trip every couple of years or so to take time to reflect, to regroup, and to regenerate.) But why shouldn’t I have been?

I had made all my connections with no problems from L.A., to Detroit, then off the
beaten path, to Memphis, then on to Atlanta in order to see my oldest son, (whom I hadn’t seen in close to two years,) then back to New Orleans to catch the standard noon train back to L.A. All was right with the world, as the song goes.

Ten hours later, though, jaw hanging open, I looked on in dismay and shock.
Against a backdrop of a Texas sky, a triangle of red, green and yellow flashing
lights, resembling a Christmas tree, had interrupted our 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 matter of seconds. It all began around 10:30 p.m., after I’d shut down my lap top and prepared to settle 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 train wheels’ screeching and braking. This crashing noise pierced the air and seemed to go on forever. The stench of burning metal filled the train. All types of thoughts raced through my mind.

What was going on? Suddenly attendants, staff, and conductors, terse expressions on their faces, were running up the aisle to the front of the train. They wouldn’t tell us what had happened for the first hour. I’m not sure if they knew. I was near the back of the train and in the curve, I realized we had skidded almost a mile from the guard rail.

Following the ruckus, I went up to the observatory where I watched police car,
after police car, fire trucks, tow trucks, and coroner’s cars hurl through the night like asteroids to the scene of the accident. The sounds of sirens wailed through the night. The train had struck a car. Unlike the dead deer, which we struck on the way from Los Angeles, these were human beings. What would happen? Would the people live?

I didn’t know if they would change our train or what? I stayed awoke the whole time.
Later, a police came in our coach at 3:30 a.m. and being as I was the only one awake, he asked if I saw anything. I told him what I heard, what I smelt. That’s all I could vouch for.

By then, I had learned that apparently, three young people, who drove around the barrier, were killed.

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

We didn’t move on until 3:30 a.m. the next morning. We were running six hours late, (of
what would become an eight hour late arrival time,) at that point. We never changed trains. Later, I learned that we were 10 miles east of Houston when the accident took place.

The next day as I watched the scenery of sage, brush, cactus, desert, yucca
plants, acacia trees, telephone wires, and windmills reel by my window, all I heard
was the whistle of death. The blood train is what I called this train. The wheels just kept
moving on in spite of death, which is how life moves on. I just wished someone would
come and process this with us, the way they do at schools when tragedies take place. Is
this post traumatic disorder?

To process my feelings, I talked to different passengers. There had definitely been three fatalities. One passenger postulated that in order for the conductor to have missed the car, he would have had to jump the tracks, endangering the lives of the passengers on board. The driver of the doomed car had made the choice to go around the rail. The passengers on the train didn’t make that choice and
shouldn’t have to suffer those consequences of someone else’s erroneous choice. This
didn’t appease my disturbed thoughts, but it made me think.

Perhaps this is one of the dilemmas of life: making a choice between the lesser of
two evils. I wondered, in a case like this, do they change conductors? Or does the same conductor continue on that tour of duty?

How do you live with taking a life—even if it’s an accident? How do you find
redemption?

I’m trying to make sense of this whole tragedy. Is this survivor guilt? Why them and not
me? Don’t get me wrong. I’m glad to be here.

When we stopped, later that afternoon, I took a picture of the front of the train and saw
that it was burned on the right side. Obviously, the car that tried to beat the train was
hit on the right side.

The way that train kept rolling along, I thought of the metaphor
of life. It just keeps going on after you die. I just have to keep going.

That next day, it occurred to me.

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

So what can we do as writers? We write down the joys, the pains, the sorrows, the
triumphs. For the next generation, we leave a map that we were here. In this way we live on long after our deaths, sort of like Anne Frank, who only lived about sixteen years, did from her diary. It is how Shakespeare captured human behavior four hundred years ago, which is just as true today. It is how Frederick Douglass’ The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass’: A Slave’s Life, and Booker T. Washington’s Up from Slavery: An Autobiography, showed us our African American history in America