Gregory Orr

I was on the cusp of adolescence. Just a kid participating in a popular American ritual: hunting, firing a gun. To hunt, to fire a gun is to have your imagination tangled up with fantasies of power. A fatal accident makes a mockery of these fantasies, leaving the unlucky fantasist exposed to the deeper randomness of life and the terrifying fact that so much of our experience is beyond our control.

It’s as if the world you inhabit (in my case, a rural field; in hers, a shooting range) is suddenly shown to be only a stage set with one of those old-fashioned painted backdrops, and your inadvertent, violent act has torn a gash in the scenery. “Accident” steps through it. “Accident,” which is such an innocuous and useful term in most contexts, but now for the child is suddenly a terrifying word, perhaps even the name of the grim and mocking god who rules this new reality.

With the accident that took my brother’s life, my whole world was changed, utterly and to its core. I survived, grew, and perhaps even thrived. But I never healed. And my survival had as much to do with luck as anything else. Part of my luck was to discover poetry, which has sustained me through a lifetime.

As a writer, my faith is that words can help us connect and make sense of our lives by bringing out our secrets and shames as well as our joys. And yet, when I try to think of what I might say to that girl, I think also of the danger of words used as premature consolation and explanation. I lost a (naïve and conventional) religious faith the day of my brother’s death, because a well-meaning adult assured me that my dead brother was already, at that very moment, sitting down in heaven to feast with Jesus. How could I tell her that my brother was still near me, still horribly close to me — that every time I squeezed shut my eyes to keep out the world, I saw him lying lifeless at my feet?

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