A Note for Rachel Scott

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I have never believed that life is revealed in its cataclysmic moments, its "wake-up calls," but rather in repose, when people go about the quieter business of being who they are. Journalists tend to turn to where the noise is. One of the things your death bequeaths is a reminder to look where the noise is not. One can tell far more interesting things about a crowd at a picnic than a mob in the streets, or about someone like you when you were writing poems and performing in school plays, or just dreaming without a sound, than when murder made you a "national symbol."

Your other bequest may be more useful still--to journalists and everyone else. No life ends on a period, no matter how long it is lived. But your abbreviated life makes one especially aware of how much there is to the unknowable and untidy. In their private hours, your parents will imagine you as a wife, a mother, an actress in the movies or at the village playhouse. For myself, I see you married--as my own daughter was married a year ago--in a church ceremony the antipode of the one you were the center of last week.

The deeper unknowable, though, is who you were before the guns locked you into a sentence. The only question that ever ought to matter to my colleagues and our customers is the one we do not ask except in retrospect, after the guns or the scandal: Who are we all in silence--at a table in the cafeteria, at a table in the library? What can journalists tell others about the mind we all share, the innocent mind and the murderous? That is the real news of your death. That is the news I want to remember next week, when Kosovo is over or not over, and CONGRESS DEBATES GUN CONTROL, and Al Hirt's trumpet is no longer heard.

I would like to have remembered it before Tuesday, April 20, when the news of the day supposedly brought you to light. Rachel, you were always in the light.

The Scott family's website is www.racheljoyscott.com