Poem of Pain and Tragedy

This is a time of tragedy. A tragedy beyond words—I feel like it goes through the heart and beyond--beyond our outer limits of consciousness. Unbearable, someone told me. But it must be born by those of us who remain; the living must bear the weight as we are the ones left to find meaning. We have a choice.

We can choose how to deal with the passing of Rick and Angela. He reluctantly wove their names together in death. May they both rest in peace.

Today I want to remember his life.

In remembering Rick we feel like we have awakened from a dizzy dream that morphed into a feverish reality. To lose a friend, what can one say? It’s the loss of a world, a universe. To lose a lover is to encounter the dark chaos where soft dreams melt and are shattered in the iron fist of reality’s hard school.

I hope that Elixcia will somehow find comfort in her time of mourning.

Some of us have known Rick personally, some of us may have known Angela personally—all of us feel pain at the horrible loss of their two precious lives.

We may have wanted to forget the past but Rick has forced us to confront the past. He wanted to be remembered. He sought surcease of pain from his legacy and his wounded name.

It is said that tragedy is what happens when a theory meets fact. But maybe that statement is too analytical, too cold. We are talking about pain.

In the song Mother and Child Reunion, Paul Simon captures the mood of a soul and a universal moment that every living child and mother can understand, when he says:

But I would not give you false hope
On this strange and mournful day
When the mother and child reunion
Is only a motion away

I can’t for the life of me
Remember a sadder day
I know they say let it be
But it just don’t work out that way
And the course of a lifetime runs
Over and over again

We may have been only watching from the sidelines, and yet some of us have felt such loss and deep emotion for the tragedy of Rick and Angela that—over and over again--we struggle to find words.

This is my attempt.

Rick’s life was enmeshed with ours, even though we may have just been regular members of the Family without any exalted or humble title denoting our service for God—yet he was the crown prince in waiting. Wasn’t he? We read his story with naïve anticipation and hope once. He was beautiful. He was gentle. He was the eternal child. And yes, he seemed to have privileges that the regular kids in the Family may have lacked, but most of us didn’t mind at the time.

We marveled that he grew into adulthood. The famous but chilling video he made before the tragedy was, for many of us, our first view of the man. Our marvel turned into shock.

His passing and tragedy has left us with an incredible sense of loss; as has every loss of life of any of the young adults from the Family that have perished in their pursuit of life, liberty, happiness and love.

It is almost surreal, a primal scene, as we witness and absorb the meaning of Rick's life as it settles now to rest at some sub-atomic quantum level where words have always failed us, formulas fall flat, and cunning equations evaporate into the eternal ether. And everything is only a motion away.

We looked to Rick, read about him, whether we wanted to or not, when we were in the Family, and now, whether we wanted to or not, as ex members we are reading about him and seeing him again, this time via the international news media.

When I look at Rick’s life I am reminded, too, of these lines of poetry:

THE CHILD IS THE FATHER TO THE MAN

And I think of Rick as a kind of living breathing tragic poem.

Davidito was the father of this man—who called himself Rick.

Some will look at him and find a love for innocence. Love for purity. Love for hope. Love for the future. Love for a child. Love for change. Love for God, maybe. Or just love.

Some will look at Rick and find the antithesis.

When Rick tossed off the wounded moniker of Davidito and became Rick, his mother’s response has been to say that she didn’t know "Rick".
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Locke