This is my last Friday night in my first big city apartment.  I'm moving to another building, closer to the lake.  Higher up.  Fewer trees in view. More sky. Sketchier building. Lower rent. I'm looking into these apartments across the alley and the courtyard for the last time.  Lives lived in such close proximity and at such a distance.  More than their human inhabitants, it is the colors of the walls in these apartments -- white-white -- textbook blue -- mossy green; it is the  artwork hanging there -- an oversized black and white canvas screened with a picture of Billie Holiday -- a large wooden spoon on a kitchen wall -- visible through windows; it is the color of the light coming through the blinds -- the Billie Holiday apartment has recently switched entirely to the cool blue-white of eco-friendly bulbs -- a lady across the courtyard who has lived here for twenty years gives off a thin dingy yellow -- the rotating college boys in the basement bright overhead light at all hours; it is with these which I have become intimately acquainted. I will miss these.

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When I first moved to Chicago I thought a great deal about the scale of community and how it impacts the quality of our lives. The large scale living that affords people the anonymity to live lives of their own choosing without the scrutiny of the neighbors also means that there are no neighbors. When nobody knows “your business,” nobody knows you. For most people here that tradeoff is acceptable, even desirable. Everyone can remain at the comfortable distance of “otherness.” No one comes too close. Nothing is too intimate, not sex, not death.

I remember the first time I was delayed on the red line because someone had fallen onto the tracks. Everyone around me was angry and impatient, concerned only that they were being held up in the course of their day. They were inconvenienced. No one seemed to consider that if nothing else, a delay caused by a stranger’s death might be an occasion for reflection, “if this were my time . . .”

No. There was no moment of silence, no heads were bowed. Instead people were pacing back and forth, bitching to one another or complaining loudly into their cell phones about the CTA – Can’t Take it Anywhere.

I was sick to my stomach. The last thing I was thinking about was getting on with my business. I couldn’t stop thinking about the woman whose life had just ended. Right then. She was going someplace, just like I was. Only now she wasn’t. Screeching brakes. Sparks. Snap your fingers. Gone. Just like that.

I guess somewhere in mind I knew people died on the tracks but now that I was experiencing it first hand I couldn’t quite believe the cold prickly math this system was based on. Thousands of people getting transported to where they are going are greater than or equal to the one that doesn’t make it. It is a question of scale. Sorry for your loss . . .

Who was she? Where was she going? Was she someone’s mother? Daughter? Wife? Sister? Sweetheart? What did she dream about when she was a girl? Did she dream? Was someone expecting her? If there was no one who would the authorities tell? Who would tell her story? Would the CTA workers pick up the contents of her purse, now scattered across the tracks and put them back inside it or will they let the wind take it all away?

The thought, as voiced by some of the other passengers on the train, that it might have been suicide, that she may have actually intended this death, did not make me feel any better. Especially since, if that were the case, the people on the train seemed to place no higher value on her life than she did. All they cared about was that in her death she had become an obstacle. No wonder she didn’t want to live any more.

I looked in the paper and on the news for the next few days hoping to learn something about this woman. She either lived or worked somewhere close by me. She was only two stops away. To my old way of thinking, she was my neighbor. I desperately needed this information – to somehow connect myself to her – I could not bear the fact that she would be as anonymous to me as she was to all of those other people on the train that day. That she was just a statistic in a poor accounting. But no details on the incident were reported; just that there had been a delay on the red line.

I am confused by the inexact measure of the value of a life in America. That day in Chicago the value of a single human life seemed very little.  Is that due to scale? What is one less when there are so many.  In a smaller place, like the Virgina Tech community one senses that even one death is keenly lamented, and 32 deaths at once are unthinkable. And even though the campus is far from here, and I don't know any of the victims, I am also deeply pained by the lives lost there.

Over the course of the week of media coverage I got to know each one of the victims. I learned their names and faces. I felt sharp pangs for their families and friends, as well as for the shooter and his family. Set apart from the rest in this tragedy as “the other.” His life seemed no less “lost” than those of his victims. The complexity of the emotion his parents and his sister must be feeling seems impossible to bear.  All of it, all of them, so painful, so impossible to bear. Bush stated that they were simply “At the wrong place at the wrong time.” Or were they in the right place at the wrong time? In a place where their lives were properly valued?  

When a nameless woman falls beneath the train isn't she also “At the wrong place at the wrong time?” Why don’t we count and name the victims of these types of misfortunes? Why don't I know the answers to all my questions about her on that day? Is it because there is no “other” to pin that on? Are those deaths just a little too familiar? Too intimate? Too necessary to our way of life? Calculated rather than an uncalculated losses? Acceptable risks. Whose arithmetic?

62417 civilian deaths in Iraq. "Calculated" as "the cost of war." All of them, “At the wrong place at the wrong time.” Yet, I can’t conjure up the face or name of a single victim to help me connect with that tragedy. Is that a coincidence? Is that a question of scale?