As University mourns, students struggle to come to terms

"You have to live in the middle of this contradiction. You have to live in this zone where both [situations] can be true, and it's very, very, very difficult. "

   Sam Richards, a sociology professor at Penn State University, recently imparted these words upon a class of confused and disconsolate students (Penn State journalist Lori Shontz was permitted to sit in on the lesson). For these young men and women, the contradiction is between what they believed and trusted about the ethically grounded institution that meant everything to them, and what they now know and refuse to believe about a morally bankrupt school that allegedly conspired to cover up the horrifying behavior of one of its employees. Submitting to one either means mourning over the disillusionment with a place and group of people millions thought they knew and could trust, or straight up ignoring reality, screening facts to hold onto a quickly receding past where things actually made sense.

   After all, tragedy can quickly make your world nonsensical. It can take the reality you once knew, and smash it hard with a big lead pipe. It can crush your hopes, your beliefs, and if devastating enough, your own will. It begets many emotions- fear, grief, outrage, misery. Perhaps the most debilitating blow it can deliver is despair. Despair is inescapable, second by second misery. Deceased author David Foster Wallace described it as "wanting to die in order to escape (an) unbearable feeling."

   We will never know exactly what Mike Racanelli was feeling in the days and hours before he passed away on Monday. I do not know how despair played into it. I do know, as we all know, that his death is a true tragedy and has left a monstrous void in the lives of thousands.

   It was, in the moments after hearing, literally unbelievable. Your mind cannot resolve the information presented as fact with the world you have deconstructed into truths about the people you know and the places they inhabit. You are emotionally and psychologically stunned. After that, it's just a race to see which feeling can get there first.

   For me, it was confusion, and one greedy question in particular: Why? I just wanted an answer for the morsel of solace that I hoped it could bring. Why did such a gregarious and gracious young man's time here come to such a sudden end? Why would my friend, the friend to so many of my friends and countless others, be moving on without us? The demand for answers came from a crippling helplessness that surrounds the aftermath of heartbreak like this and paralyzes those left in its wake to wonder. We want to know why because we want to know what we could have done to prevent it from happening.

   "Dude never complained about anything," remarked one of our friends in the hours after. "Literally, I didn't know what classes he took because he would never bitch about them. I never heard him complain about anything."

   It's a sad truth, perhaps the only truth that we will never precisely know how others feel. Emotion is not quantifiable. It is relative, and it is concealable. The disappointed hurt those loyal fans in Happy Valley feel cannot be compared and contrasted with the constant, vicious pain that everyone who knew and adored Mike is feeling. And the compassionate, loving man many knew as Rac, the kid whose charm and charisma attracted all who met him, cannot be reconciled with the internally suffering man who we now count among our dearly departed. 

   This is the contradiction that we, as a community, are going to have to live with. It is not one we want to accept and will be very difficult to deal with. Asserting itself as the sobering realization that we didn't know everything we thought we did about this wonderful and eternally positive young man, it pains us so terribly because we want to believe in the worst way that Mike would never leave us like this.

   Yet, we must not attempt to skirt around the truth and push it perpetually out of our minds. The philosopher Søren Kierkegaard referred to this course of action as "despair from a lack of finitude"- a desire to not believe leads to a construction of fantasy that transports an individual away from the hard, finite reality he or she doesn't want to face. Doing this will help no one heal. Pretending it didn't exist would be a disservice to Mike and the visceral turmoil he struggled with. This is the reality of one person's life. And we must honor him by believing it.

   So, we are indebted to cope. We will celebrate the far-too-short life that Mike had and the light he shone on the lives others. We will pray for his family and friends, hope for them, and provide support to help carry them through their indescribable grief. And we will mourn Michael; mourn that his life ended in this manner; mourn that we were unable to prevent it from happening; but mostly mourn that he is no longer with us, a now untethered soul who a few days and a lifetime ago was such an illuminating part of our lives.

   We will miss him more than he ever would have known. I just wish I could have told him how much.

Tim Jablonski

A&S ‘13