When I walked into the office, Cindy was sitting at her desk blubbering with make-up running down her face. A few other people, including the chain-smoking, sandy-haired senior who she had an unrequited crush on, were standing around looking grim. No one spoke up so the idea that Cindy was being histrionic flashed through my mind. Perhaps they were uncomfortable as she was prone to reacting emotionally to the smallest of disappointments.
With no explanation forthcoming, I asked Cindy what was happening. She looked at me with black-smudged and red eyes and blurted out, "Eric is dead." There were two Erics in my life at that time, and this one was a "lesser" one. He wasn't less in any sense of his personal value, but rather in terms of how long and how well I'd known him.
This Eric, Eric K, was a member of the psychology club to which I also belonged. My main experience with him was traveling to a Hare Krishna temple in West Virginia on a trip that we took as a group in order to experience a vastly different culture without having to leave the country. We saw a golden temple there and ate vegetarian lasagna that tasted very strange to me. Eric had copper red hair, a cheesy mustache, and blue eyes. His nature was gentle and soft-spoken and he was polite in assessing the quality of the funky lasagna. Now, he was, quite confusingly, dead in his twenty-first year on the planet.
Through sobs and streaming tears, Cindy stammered out some incomprehensible details about Eric's having tried to rescue a girl who was being abused by her boyfriend. Eric and a friend were walking through a parking lot and a man was trying to drag a woman into a car by her arm. The boyfriend stabbed Eric in the neck and Eric's companion in the chest. The companion survived his wound, but Eric bled to death in the parking lot. His life just drained out onto the ground.
Sometimes I think about Eric and what his life might have been had he not decided to help a woman in distress. He wouldn't have died, but he would have lived knowing he didn't step in when he might have to protect someone who appeared to need protection. The most bitter part of my memory is knowing that his killer got off because the girlfriend claimed that Eric and his companion were threatening and aggressive in their attempts to help her. I wasn't there, but I'm very comfortable calling her a liar. There was no way that gentle soul with the cheesy mustache meant to do anything other than help. R.I.P. Eric. You are not forgotten, even by those whose lives you touched in a cursory fashion.
