Susan Brison’s Aftermath ends twice: the final chapter discusses her various efforts to retell the story of her brutal rape and attempted murder (she calls it “attempted sexual murder.”) And ends with her final, planned retelling to her son when he is older:
“Tragedy,” Wittgenstein wrote, “is when the tree, instead of bending, breaks.” What I wish most for my son is not the superhuman ability to avoid life-threatening disasters, but, rather, resilience, the capacity to carry on, alive in the present, unbound by dread or regret. Not the hard, flinty brittleness of rock, but the supple tenacity of the wind-rocked bough that bends, the bursting desire of a new-mown field that can’t wait to grow back, the will to say, whatever comes, Let’s see what happens next.
The second ending comes in an afterword where she discusses four murders. The first set of murders is the murder of her friends Susanne and Half Zantop which occurs soon after she submitted the manuscript. The second set is the murder of Trhas Berhe and Selamawit Tsehaye, two of five Black women candidates for PhD in physics at Dartmouth a decade before. Because they were Black international students from Ethiopia–killed by a third Black Ethiopian–the campus treated these murders as non-events, and failed to mourn or respond with what we sometimes think of as the characteristic security theater.
In both cases she struggles with survivor’s guilt, the sense that their deaths and her survival were random, and undeserved. So she finishes the story again:
None of us is supposed to be alive. We’re all here by chance and only for a little while. The wonder is that we’ve managed, once again, to winter through and that our hearts, in spite of everything, survive.
Second Opinions