I Knew Her Horatio
How Do We Live with Senseless Tragedy?
Eina Kwon was sitting in her car at a traffic light in Seattle waiting for it to turn green. She was eight months pregnant with her second child. She was in the car with her husband, Evan, just two blocks from the restaurant they co-owned. It was 11:15 in the morning on a Tuesday - a day like so many other days - on a route they had driven countless times.
A man crossed in front of their car and unloaded the entire contents of his semi-automatic handgun into their car. Eina and her unborn daughter were killed. Evan was hit three times by bullets but lived.
They didn’t know the shooter.
Nothing happened to provoke the attack.
He just walked in front of their car and did the unthinkable.
She was only 34. Her son was 3.
~~~~~~
I hadn’t been in Seattle for two years since moving to Portugal.
It was Friday night, and I was meeting friends at my favorite sushi restaurant.
I had known the owners for six years. They were a young Korean couple. They worked hard as any small business owner does. The American dream does not come easily.
I started to frequent their restaurant shortly after they opened - in those early years when a new businesses success is tenuous. We bonded over small business ownership - the trials and the tribulations. Some nights the restaurant was painfully empty, and I worried if they would make it. I was so thrilled when they became pregnant, as I too had used working for myself as a means to start my own family.
It might be an over statement to call them friends, but I did buy them a present when their baby boy was born and gifted them a weekend getaway at my hotel to give them a break from the rigors of running their own business.
When Covid hit I made sure they knew how to apply for an emergency government loan to help their business survive the forced closure.
I knew them well enough to give them hugs when I went in for a monthly sushi in the city date night and had texted Eina to let her know I was back in town and was coming there with a party of six to have dinner and to see them again.
She never replied to my text…
I should have known something was wrong when I made eye contact with Evan behind the sushi counter, but he looked away as if he didn’t recognize me.
I should have known something was wrong when I asked our server if Eina was working that night, and she gave me a weird look.
I should have known - but no one expects the unimaginable.
The shooting had happened in June of 2023.
I had no idea when I walked through those doors on Friday night that I would unwittingly be forcing this poor husband and father to reopen a wound that perhaps, just maybe, after a year had started to slightly scab over.
He came over to our table, “There was an accident.”
“A car accident?” I asked?
“No with a gun. Eina is gone.”
There was not enough sake to hold back my tears.
~~~~~~
Tragedies like this happen every day.
In every corner of the world senseless violence occurs at such a rate that most of us don’t even blink when we hear the nightly news. If we bawled through dinner every time we hear a tragic news story - if we allowed ourselves to feel the heartbreak that occurs daily - we wouldn’t be able to function.
And yet I knew her…
I am still having a hard time wrapping my head around the fact that I will never walk into that restaurant and see her again.
I ask myself impossible questions such as “What if she had forgotten something in the house and had run back in to get it. What if she was at that intersection just a moment sooner or later?”
Our logical minds want to know why. Why her? Why did all the moments of time coalesce to have her at that intersection at that moment?
There are no answers of course. I know I’m just trying to make sense of the senseless.
That’s the problem of course. We desperately want to make sense of the senseless, in the vain hope that in doing so we might be better able to control our own lives. That in doing so we might be able to protect ourselves and those we love from the unimaginable.
But we can’t. No one can.
Sometimes the hero dies. Oftentimes bad things happen to good people. Sometimes you’re stopped at the wrong traffic light on a beautiful morning in June.
Life doesn’t conform to what our human mind would consider just or fair. Life doesn’t seem to care.
As a writer I understand a story arc. I know that readers want a denouement.
I don’t have one for you.
I wish I did.
I wish I knew, dear reader, what wisdom to offer any of us on how to live with a life that is filled with the unimaginable.
But as the song in Hamilton goes, “there are moments that the words don’t reach. There is suffering too terrible to name.”
No words…
I am so, so sorry, Maureen. How very painful and what a shock. I have been at that corner many times. Random violence is so hard. So are racial attacks. Let's work hard for a better more inclusive and gun violence-free future.