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10 All Survivors Are Victims
- Wayne State University Press
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195 10 ALL SURVIVORS ARE VICTIMS 1 At some point in the months following October, someone in the upper administration remarked, “I think we’ve lost a year.” “We were kind of like zombies,” Kelly Schulte says of the group of women closest to Maggie. “We were expected to go to class, and she was in two of my classes, and it was just like there was a hole. I was supposed to go on, as normal. The college offered all these resources to talk to anyone, but then again you’re eighteen; you think you can handle it on your own. We had each other, we had our parents, but . . . it was like the world kept going, but we were stuck in that day.” To a lesser extent, we all were. October 18, 1999, shadowed every succeeding day, and everything we did was somehow projected against its backdrop. The Counseling Center, radically understaffed on a good day, was swamped all year, but many of the people closest to the deaths, like Kelly, failed to seek help. At eighteen you not only think you can handle it, you often don’t even have the experience to recognize the signs that there is something to handle. It’s said that ours is a culture of victimization and pathologization, especially where kids are con- CHAPTER 10 196 cerned, but by and large the ones I teach try to tough things out instead of seeking help. Their dominant ethos—especially the males’—is one of “strength”: will, self-reliance, and avoiding adult authority. It’s part of the same orientation that prevented Maggie, Neenef, or any of their friends from seeking adult help before October 18. As the first unreal, stunned days stretched into weeks and months, most Kalamazoo students relied heavily on their peers, a “developmentally appropriate” response, as Pat Ponto’s memo told us. Nancy ElShamaa was one: “I went to talk to Pat a couple times a week. But I think the biggest support, the reason we all made it, was each other. Pat was very helpful . . . but it was the other students’ support that really helped.” Brooke Nobis had a built-in surrogate family in her little bungalow just off campus. “I just had a rock-solid group of girls I lived with,” she says, “and I knew I could just sit on that porch until—sit with them and not even say anything. And that’s what I did: I just sat, and they talked to me.” Because she appeared on the list of Maggie’s friends, someone from the Counseling Center contacted her, but she never returned the call. “I felt really comforted by the girls I was with,” she says. Like many who lived through Maggie’s murder, her memories become blurred after the week of October 18: “It then just became a really rough year.” The golf team, already close, drew even closer together after Maggie ’s death. The team included some fairly advanced partiers—with the exception of Sara Church, the well-behaved, serious one, the type who never turns a paper in late. “One night we decided that we were going to have a memorial party for Maggie,” Heidi Fahrenbacher remembers. “So we got Popov vodka, and we drank [it] and smoked Marlboro Ultra Lights. Watching Sara try to smoke a cigarette—she was so—I kept having to take her for a walk around the block because she kept saying, ‘I think I want to drink more,’ and I was like, ‘Sara, I think you are going to throw up.’” To raise money for some kind of memorial to Maggie, the team designed and sold arm patches in Kalamazoo’s colors, orange and black, reading: “Stop Violence Against Women” across the top and, at the bottom, “Maggie Wardle, 1980–1999.” The patches appeared on backpacks and jackets across the campus. I remember noting at the time that the golf team, at least, had decided what to call Maggie’s death. [18.116.20.177] Project MUSE (2024-04-17 21:42 GMT) ALL SURVIVORS ARE VICTIMS 197 Despite his intimate confrontation with the carnage in his bathroom, Navin Anthony emerged solid, because of friends and also because he compartmentalized easily. “I remember I was able to sleep OK,” he says. “I think the mind definitely has a way of saying, ‘Put this out of your mind. This part of this incident was quite gruesome or quite traumatizing, but we will just close...