angels

My cell phone rang as I was watching my son’s little league baseball game. His team is called “The Angels”. Their uniforms are red, white, and blue. The day was sunny, the Presidio abundantly green. Ilyse was calling to get another friend’s number, to let her know that one of ours had just been killed in Iraq. When Ilyse said her name, I couldn’t place it, but later, when I saw her picture, I reeled with recognition. A woman I have been at many gatherings, many parties with. Marla Ruzicka, who had worked at Rainforest Action and Global Exchange, who had gone on to start her own organization, CIVIL, which documents civilian casualties in war zones and advocates for their care. Twenty-nine years old, she died outside Baghdad, blown up in a car.

Watching my son play ball, in this beatific setting, I felt my stomach clench, and a sense of unreality descended quickly. A war is going on across the world, people are dying. The Angels were playing ball in their patriotic colors, and someone from my community was just killed. Therapists have a great word for the state I was in – “cognitive dissonance”. As much as I knew, I still couldn’t make sense of it. It was a mindfuck. It still is.

The next few weeks are going to be rough. Ilyse and Fern are crying a lot. We took food around the corner to Elizabeth, one of Marla’s good friends, and other friends gathered. Ilyse was on the phone a lot – the quintessential organizer/activist, working out Marla’s memorial service for the activist community. There’s going to be a lot of media coverage on this one. It’s real story.

Marla was doing what she loved. Everyone is saying this. Her favorite quote was the one by Che about true revolutionaries being guided by love. Elizabeth is worried that she’s confused right now, that she wasn’t ready or prepared to die, that she’ll get stuck somehow. I’m thinking of all those dead civilians whose stories she collected, whose families she interviewed. I’m imagining the civilian dead reaching out to her, lauding her for her work for the living, welcoming her to the other side. She certainly has friends there, as well as here.