time - space - grieving

In my day job I'm the Postgraduate Research Coordinator in the School at my University. A few days before returning to Melbourne from Vietnam, I received the dreadful news that one of my School's postgraduate students, Minnie Kairu, had been killed in a car accident in Nairobi (her home city) where she'd recently travelled to to conduct some primary research for her PhD on religion, media and globalization (through the specific form of broadcast evangelical crusades in Kenya). Minnie was an older than usual postgraduate student. She'd studied in the USA, worked as director of learning institutions in Zimbabwe and Kenya, and was the proud single mother of her only daughter, a student in our undergraduate program. 

I've been struggling to know how to react to Minnie's death; or, more accurately, perhaps, I've had that odd feeling of looking on and monitoring myself--in a curious way--to see how I emotionally respond. Possibly because I haven't had anyone really close to me ever die and frankly the thought of that scares me more than anything else I can think of. And its jarring when you've just turned 40 and you think that life has been good because you've experienced interesting things, coped with getting to that age OK, met great people and so on.

Minnie and I weren't close but we talked every now and then, we bumped into each other in the corridors and said hello. And being away in Vietnam last week I wasn't back in time for the memorial service that many of the other friends and colleagues of Minnie at my University attended. Not of course that grief can be dealt with collectively in a simple service but there is something important about the collective marking of it even though the experience carries on afterwards in a multitude of ways and bodies.

Yesterday I was feeling a bit overwhelmed by the list of tasks awaiting me at work, things going on that I needed to organise despite the fact that one of these postgraduates was suddenly no longer around when I registered Minnie's name on an old spreadsheet and it jumped out to gently sting me after being there in my consciousness for five minutes already . I felt resentful?  guilty? that it seemed so easy to simply move on and her death subsumed by the pressures of work and the flow of daily life. When is the appropriate time and where the appropriate space to grieve and/or remember? And how to do it outside of the cliches that we turn to when a death of someone we know occurs.

Later that night I found a way for me, this time, in the blog entry of another postgraduate student, Paul, who is studying in the same general field (media and religion) as Minnie. In the post he recounts walking with her in the streets of Sweden while at a conference together. In just one sentence he helped me by writing one of the most fabulous things you could possibly write about Minnie if you knew her: 'Walking down a street with Minnie was like being reintroduced to the planet'.

My own simple memory that comes to mind is from a couple of months ago at drinks on the roof, music blaring,  and Minnie enthusiastically bailing me up and telling me how much she loved music, though I can't remember what kind but I do remember her smile, the way she twisted her hips and did a little dance as she moved off to talk to someone else. So I grieve here for you Minnie in some simple lines of text and some memories of mine and others of a precious individual now gone.