Memories and uncertainties: Thoughts on the death of a classmate

I’d heard about the accident early on Monday, a seven-car pile-up on Route 78 that had left two women dead. I saw some of the videos — the terrible wreckage was sobering — but did nothing with the news. It didn’t appear to have a local connection and I had to worry about the communities our newspapers covered.

That changed later that night when my wife Annie received a call from her friend Nicki. One of the drivers had graduated with us.

Janet Ilnicki had been prom queen and homecoming queen, an incredibly popular girl at South Brunswick High School. I knew her, like I knew most of our class. Back in the late 1970s, there was probably 1,100 students at the high school (compared with current graduating classes of 700), so we all knew each other on some level.

I was friendlier with her during freshman and sophomore years than I was during our final two years at the high school. We travelled in different circles, had different friends, though we shared some of the same classes.

And yet, the news of the accident and her death struck a chord. I know it struck a chord with many others from our graduating class — about 30 or so of us have been communicating via a running thread on Facebook. Some of the writers had been good friends with Janet in high school; others were like me. All of us had nothing but good things to say about her.

I remember when I heard the news about another classmate, Mukul Agarwala, who died on 9/11. He had started at his new job in the towers that Monday. I was friends with him — pretty good friends, in fact — for a number of years, but lost touch after high school. Seeing his face on my computer screen was eerie and sad and reminded me that things are so fragile.

Janet’s death struck me the same way. The circumstances of her death could be described as the definition of an accident — as one of her father’s neighbors told me in an e-mail — one coincidence piling on top of another so that she was in the wrong place at exactly the wrong time.

Ms. Adamko spent Sunday with her family in South Brunswick commemorating the 10-year anniversary of her sister’s death. Ms. Adamko left early Monday and was killed in a seven-car pileup around 10:42 a.m. near Exit 49A on Route 78.

State police said the accident began after a dump truck, which was in the westbound express lane, crossed into the eastbound lane and turned over. The dump truck struck a tractor-trailer, which then jackknifed, and five passenger vehicles were caught in the accident as the dump truck spilled rock and dirt across the interstate, according to state police spokesman Stephen Jones.

Basically, it could have been any of us.

As with Mukul’s death, the news spread quickly through a high school community that splintered into memory within months after graduation. We were a cliquish class, not particularly unified, a fact highlighted by the fragmented nature of the two reunions I’ve attended (and by our inability, generally, to plan them). I’ve kept in touch with a handful of close friends, see a few others who I was friends with in high school and have wondered about a number of others. But I have not had an overriding desire to recreate my high school years (God forbid).

I think part of what I am feeling is tied to my growing older. I am 46 and the death of someone I’d known when I was younger, someone who was the same age as me and came from the same place, really underscores the fragility of things, highlights the reality that our time here is quite fleeting. That is something I understood intellectually when I was 16, but not emotionally.

At 16 — or 20 or even 25 — there is that sense that one is invincible, that there is an entire world open for us. By 46, our expectations have changed and we look at the world through very different eyes.

I can see that uncertainties are the only certain thing in this world — I guess you could say that it is my foundational belief, the idea that allows me to make sense of a world that often seems so chaotic and out of control. Death frames so much of our lives — my father-in-law, a brother-in-law, a cousin, a close friend, a couple of classmates, co-workers and the harsh news that runs across the TV screen daily.

And we move on, keep going, enjoy the highs — watching our new dogs play with a toy together, for instance, or taking my nephews to the Pennsylvania Dutch market on Route 27 — and huddle together in response to the lows.

Here is a poem I wrote back in probably 2002 or 2003 (published in Big Hammer a few years ago). I guess it is my 9/11 poem, but I think it is apt as I stare out the window of my office on Witherspoon Street in Princeton, the sun shining on the wet macadam:

CERTAINTIES AND UNCERTAINTIES
(After Attila Jozsef, “To Sit, To Stand, To Kill, To Die”)

To drag this rake across wet leaves,
to scrub the crud from the bottom of this pan,
to wake as sunlight breaks through the gap in the shades,
to worry that all this could burn out, break,
all in the blink of an eye,
to pray that it won’t, that this can continue,
that these loves, this life can live on,
to wait for the telephone’s electronic ring,
to wander in the vast tundra of the mind,
to catch lighting bugs in jars,
to stare in disbelief as jets crash
and the towers crumble,
to know the calendar pages still turn,
to wander the curves of your hips
and the crevices of your soul,
to capture your queen and move on your king,
to reboot your computer after it’s crashed,
to answer nasty e-mails
or just delete them unread,
to forget,
to crest upon you like a wave in your mind,
to leave and never return,
to only know the moment
and guess the future,
to look these uncertainties in the eye
and laugh or cry but
always to keep it going, to get along
in this, this uncertain world of ours.

Author: hankkalet

Hank Kalet is a poet and freelance journalist. He is the economic needs reporter for NJ Spotlight, teaches journalism at Rutgers University and writing at Middlesex County College and Brookdale Community College. He writes a semi-monthly column for the Progressive Populist. He is a lifelong fan of the New York Mets and New York Knicks, drinks too much coffee and attends as many Bruce Springsteen concerts as his meager finances will allow. He lives in South Brunswick with his wife Annie. View all posts by hankkalet