April Is The Cruelest Month…

April 15, 2011 in Montana

by lizard

So begins T.S. Eliot’s landmark poem, The Wasteland; the poem that helped usher in the Modern era in literature. But it’s this first line that has haunted me for years, and after wrestling with the why, I’ve come to believe that, whether he knew it or not, Eliot was on to something.

13 years ago, in the early hours of April 1st, my friend Lisa was hit and killed by a drunk driver while she was crossing the street. We were both in our first year of college (the previous spring she was my platonic prom date). Getting that phone call at 8 in the morning on the first of April was a terrible sort of cruelty. Of course there’s no good day to get news like this, but it being April Fool’s seemed to make the shock that much harder to absorb.

That was 1998.