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Utopian Turtletop. Monsieur Croche's Bête Noire. Contact: turtletop [at] hotmail [dot] com

Saturday, April 15, 2006

Aftermath of the shootings. Last night I spoke with one of the managers at the neighborhood food co-op that lost two employees in the “blue house” murders of a few weeks ago. She had lived at the house and was close with one of the men who died. She spoke of the outpouring of love and support from the community, from friends, co-op members, others in the food business. My neighborhood co-op is an independent, and the local chain co-op had made aggressive overtures of “merger,” and, if not merger, then of opening a store of their own in the neighborhood. In the aftermath of the murders they sent staff to help with inventory and stocking as a huge percentage of my co-op’s staff went out on leave. The Trader Joe’s across the street sent flowers. A wine distributor is donating many cases of wine and cheese for a wake. Emails, cards, flowers, letters continue to pour in. I barely knew one of the 2 men -- didn’t know his name -- but I almost started crying while talking to this woman. One of the co-op staffers still hasn’t come back to work. “None of us are family to them [the people who died], so we couldn’t get any information, couldn’t find out what was going on from the hospital or the police. He [the staffer who’s still on leave] was Jason’s best friend, and he was the one who broke into his apartment and found out he wasn’t there and figured out what was going on.”

I gave the woman a hug, but there’s nobody can do anything about death. There is no comfort. The love of friends and strangers helps, but nothing can fill the gap. Time will scar it over, but the wound never completely heals. Loss riddles us.




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