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| Tom Toth, I Barely Knew Ye |
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| Professional Grievers: Would I Score More Points If I Actually Fall To My Knees? |
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This is Dark Cloud on Wednesday, April 28, 1999. In 1962, a high school classmate of mine was killed at a train crossing in New Hampshire. He was a nice kid, clearly beloved by, as I recall, his widowed mother, with a high voice and very dark, very long hair for these pre-Beatle days. His name was Tom Toth. He was an average student, an average athlete except in track, where he showed great potential as a sprinter. He was not from wealth, he was not perceived as cool, he was fourteen or fifteen and he was dead. We came back from, I think, Christmas vacation and this all-boys school had a meeting called and the headmaster told us the grisly details. I cannot recall exactly how it came about, but at that meeting it was decided that his classmates, of which I was one, should have a separate meeting to decide how to remember our classmate, how to, I guess, learn from this horrible event. It was an eye-opener. For one, the jocks and the wanna-be alpha males led the discussion. They talked about the horror, the emotional devastation, and eventually someone - I believe a noted drunk and social animal - suggested we bow our heads and pray and ask God the questions in our heart. I had no trouble formulating the question: Why God? What the hell did I do to deserve this? But that was not the query in the minds of those orators of the last few minutes. What they were asking themselves was: who the hell was Tom Toth? Did I know him? Did I like him? Was he cool? The answer in just about every case was "No." Tom's best friend at this school was a guy named Geoff Yahn, also a fringie with huge ears and great talent on the piano. I, inhabiting the vague area between the in's and the out's, sort of knew him, shared some classes. Talked. I never would have called him a friend, nor he me, but we at least knew each other. The discussion about how best to remember someone the speakers never knew in the first place would have been hysterically funny if they weren't so earnest, so sincere in their attempts to get extra-curricular activity points on the record for college by pandering to a memory that was, most unfortunately, vague and someone else's. The meeting went on and on. Another was scheduled. At the end of all this, something that today would be called a grieving process, was the Thomas Toth Award, to be given at graduation to that student that, well, best exhibited the qualities supposedly held by Tom Toth as recalled by people who never actually knew him. In the event, Mahatma Ghandi, El Cid, and St. Thomas Aquinas would, if I recall the award, be only marginally qualified. I pride myself on few things, but that I was physically nauseated throughout, and said so, is something I can look back on in with some satisfaction. Further, I think Tom Toth would have laughed hysterically as well. Needless to add, Tom Toth has been in my thoughts recently as I watched and listened to what seemed to be Denver's breast-beating best as Colorado laid the victims and murderers of Columbine High School to rest. I want to tell you that I do not make light of it, but when I see carefully made up and outfitted teenage girls on television stating for the record how devastated they were that their friends were killed and hurt, I hear it again. I hear that careful teenage fraud, which is based on the childlike belief that all tragedy should be viewed from their own vantage point. If everyone is so devastated, they sure had time to gussy up for the cameras which, by the by, is not something a truly distraught person would choose to do. I tell you what else I heard. I heard what I would bet was the condescending hypocrisy and self-worshipping valuation that grated on the murderers. What the murderers did was, in every conceivable way, utterly horrible and wrong. Mass murder can kindly be called an overreaction to superficiality as they perceived it. But that is not to say that jocks and prom queens and all the high school types that exist everywhere are not as cruel, selfish, disconnected from reality and others as the Trench Coat Mafia concluded. It is indeed annoying to hear the world views of a seventeen year old football player, who lisps off the buzz words adults want to hear: family, God, and deep love of his fellow students, all of whom he daily tries to help from his godlike pinnacle where he exists in humility. We all knew people exactly like that, and maybe some, maybe all of the dead were genuinely like that and good people. But we also knew many more of the opposite: the conniving manipulators of adults and each other, getting by solely on looks and earnest expressions and the ability to catch a football better than others, or sleeping with or leaving the impression they would sleep with those who did. And while I do not believe in God or spiritual principalities, I think it disgusting that funerals and memorials are so often filled with such bombast, such competitive mourning, such lies. I don't know who recalls Tom Toth thirty five years after. Certainly none of the recipients of the reward in his name. I can only suppose some of his family, perhaps a few of the faculty who taught him, and a few other guys like me. Geoff Yahn would have, I know, but he was, ironically, also killed at a train crossing in New Hampshire about ten years later. There is no conclusion to be drawn. No ends to be tied up. |
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