Attend the Oscars Or Be Murdered: On the Severity of Life

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All we know is the country she was murdered in. We don’t know exactly why or how she died or who killed her. We know it wasn’t a suicide. She was a woman in a foreign country investigating human trafficking, so there are many possibilities. There are also many conspiracy theories. There was no autopsy. Her body was never returned to her family. They were not given a cause of death. I’m talking about a former middle school and high school classmate of mine. Let’s call her Bianca.

Even though I didn’t know her well, I have felt haunted by Bianca’s death the past year and a half. I recently listened to her on a podcast that was released about a month before she died. Her voice was so filled with purpose as she answered the host’s questions about human trafficking, I felt as if she were alive and answering the questions in real time. Photos of Bianca from before her death show her looking nearly identical to herself as a teenager. The small frame, wide smile, straight hair, all the same.

The longer I live and the more I experience, the more I believe life is about chance and randomness. I am not a fan of the overused phrase, Everything happens for a reason. As Nicholas Clairmont succinctly explained for Big Think, this idea “manages to combine the maximum of ignorance with the maximum of arrogance.” In The Atlantic, Robert H. Frank breaks down why we don’t talk about luck. “Psychologists use the term hindsight bias to describe our tendency to think, after the fact, that an event was predictable even when it wasn’t.”

I find my thoughts often returning to Bianca’s death as well as to victims of human trafficking. It has become part of my perspective in a new, visceral way.

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It was less than a month ago. Oscars night. I was online, flipping through pictures of the red carpet fashion. On the left side of the screen, I saw a name I recognized. I looked to the right and saw someone I had spent a considerable amount of time with growing up. She was wearing a gown with a plunging neckline. She looked radiant. I’ll call her Molly.

Molly and I had performed in university productions together when she was in college and I was a high school student. She graduated from college the year I graduated high school. She was always very kind to me. She came to my graduation party, and my mom remembers her eating cookies in the kitchen. We both moved to a large city the next year. She visited me in my very first apartment and we watched TV and ate brownies. I ended up moving to a different city a couple years later, but we had mutual friends living in both of our cities before I moved again. One mutual friend had sent the two of us an email in the past year. When I read the email, I assumed she was doing well but didn’t know she had transitioned from stage to screen.

A Google search informed me that she had acted in a film that won an Oscar earlier in the evening. Vogue had declared her a new style star. I felt excited, proud, and yes, jealous, but in a happy way. Who doesn’t want their life to be more exciting and glamorous? Wearing sweats and my hair in a messy bun, I felt as if I needed to wash my hair repeatedly for the next four hours. Even though my bedhead and sweats were making me feel super lame, I felt satisfied knowing that great things were happening for a genuinely great person. She’s an intelligent and talented woman of color, and I know she has already inspired many people.

Naturally, I started to reflect on surprises in life, and various friends and acquaintances, and sadly, Bianca came to mind. She was a rising star in her own field. These are two extreme cases, but if the world were a fair place, both of these women would still be thriving. If Bianca hadn’t died, she would still be changing the world. The way she bravely lived life is something we should all aspire to. I’m trying to learn more about human trafficking as a small way to honor her.

On this bittersweet evening, I also started to analyze myself. In comparison to what I perceived as narratives of tragedy and triumph, my life felt like a mixed bag. I had a life-threatening illness, but I eventually recovered. I’ve had some wonderful experiences as a writer and former performer, but I continue to live hand to mouth. I’m single, but my life is filled with friends and family. My life could be classified as “ok.” Of course, an “ok” life is all relative. “The one dimension of personal luck that transcends all others is to have been born in a highly developed country,” Frank reminds us.

Overall, I had never felt so ordinary before. I found myself wondering, Am I boring? I know it’s cringeworthy, but my night of reflection started to selfishly turn into an exercise in self-loathing. At least I’m self-aware enough to know when I’m being self-centered, right? I decided to stop analyzing everything. I went to bed.

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When I woke up, I wasn’t sure what to think. I still don’t. This essay doesn’t really have an ending because anything could happen. I don’t know about the future, but I’m certainly paying attention.

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Also by Wilhelmina Jane White, here on GMP: