Remembering Dallas Colburn and Nathanael Madison
by Bryan Tripp
In the class ENG373: Light in the Darkness, we read many books that all had a central theme of darkness. The darkness we looked at included ancient suffering, institutional darkness, family darkness, internal darkness, as well as trauma theory. One of the books that struck me most deeply was the book A Grief Observed by C.S. Lewis, which we read in late March, 2021. In this book, Lewis takes the reader through his grief after the passing of his wife, Helen Joy Davidman, referred to as H. throughout the book. Over the course of his account, Lewis goes through many different stages of grief, all of which make much more sense to me now, compared to before the car accident on April 20 that took the life of two of my best friends, Nate Madison and Dallas Colburn. Nate was a loving, fun, spontaneous personality who would never let you down, and Dallas was a quirky, fun, hardworking person who was not just my roommate but my brother. Reading A Grief Observed in March, I had no idea that I would be so engaged with the concept of grief just three weeks later. Reading Lewis’s work again at the end of the semester really made me think about a second part of the course, our review of trauma theory. At the time, I thoroughly enjoyed reading and writing about an excerpt from Cathy Caruth’s Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History: in particular, whether trauma is an encounter with death or surviving through another’s death (Caruth 7). When I wrote about trauma theory for class, I analyzed this question in depth and attempted to explain that trauma is in fact both scenarios, something I saw more clearly after April 20.
I include some memories of my friends here, to help those who weren’t fortunate enough to know them to understand them and their character. One of the most vivid memories I have of Nate is from our first year at Judson. Our GEN101 class became very close, and from this, multiple romantic relationships formed quickly in the class, but then all of these couples suddenly broke up in one weekend. That weekend, when some of us were hurting from these breakups, Nate took us to Dunkin’ Donuts and then stayed up with us, making us feel loved and seen and making us laugh until nearly 4 A.M. That was Nate, selfless. Dallas’ story is a little harder to narrow down because there are so many, but I think back to one consistent thing. No matter what was going on in his own life, or how much work he had to do for architecture studio, he made himself available to his friends for anything they may need. If one of us were leaving the room, he would ask where we were off to; we’d tell him, and then he would say “Bye, have fun, be safe.” That’s who Dallas was, someone who always finished what needed to be done, and cared about you, almost to a fault, and tried to make every aspect of life fun.
On the night of April 20, 2021, Dallas and Nate were killed in a high-speed car crash, in which they were ejected from the vehicle and since which the drivers of the three striking vehicles have been charged in a criminal court. In the weeks since my friends’ death, I think I have genuinely begun to understand what true grief is, similar to what C.S. Lewis describes. The first, and easiest, instance connecting my own experience and Lewis’s was the actual encounter with death. H., Dallas, and Nate all died as a result of trauma. For H, it was medical and somewhat expected, since she was battling cancer when she died, but for Dallas and Nate, it was sudden, and horrific. Dallas and Nate suffered great physical trauma in the car crash. H. on the other hand, had the trauma of fighting a disease over time, and all the physical, emotional, and spiritual hardships that comes with that battle.
What is perhaps more difficult to understand is the idea that trauma happens after living through another’s traumatic death, which is specifically the problem of those who are left behind. The first part of surviving the trauma of loss is the unexplainable emotions that Lewis faced after H.’s death. Lewis first writes that grief feels like fear. But then he changes it to feeling drunk, or concussed, or some combination of these (Lewis 1-2). He has trouble narrowing down what grief feels like. In her writing on trauma, Cathy Caruth explains that trauma “is experienced too soon, too unexpectedly, to be fully known and is therefore not available to consciousness until it imposes itself again, repeatedly, in the nightmares and repetitive actions of the survivor” (Caruth 4). While Lewis had the time before H.’s death to help prepare for the inevitable, the suddenness of Dallas and Nate’s passing has surely made it harder for those of us who lived and loved with them. As I sit to write this, I think back over the last few weeks, as I have been struggling with the unexpected grief that suddenly arises at random times of the day. I think about my emotions in that time. I’ve felt sad, angry, hurt, and even happy, sometimes all at once, and sometimes I feel nothing at all. When I started to go through A Grief Observed again after the accident, this confusion of emotion was the first part of Lewis’s account that I truly related to.
The first time I read A Grief Observed, I started by looking for analogies, when Lewis compares his loss to different things to try to explain what it is like. For example, his grief was like a man losing his leg, as opposed to a man getting his appendix removed. One analogy that I remember from my first reading is the analogy about salt. Lewis says: “I suppose that if one were forbidden all salt one wouldn’t notice it much more in one food than in another. Eating in general would be different, every day, at every meal. It is like that. The act of living is different all through” (Lewis 11). Lewis’ idea that every aspect of your life changes during grief is so true. And I see that now. Sleeping is different. Eating is different. Homework is different. Watching TV is different. Everything I have gone to do over the past few weeks feels weird and wrong. This idea drives straight into another aspect of the book that stood out to me, when Lewis said “it’s not true that I’m always thinking of H. Work and conversation make that impossible. But the times when I’m not, are perhaps my worst. For then, over everything a vague sense of wrongness, of something amiss” (Lewis 35). Everything has felt different, even wrong, since Nate and Dallas passed away. Everything feels wrong because everything I do reminds me of them, specifically Dallas. We used to do everything together, and now I can’t do anything with him. This is hard, and I know it is going to be like this for a long, long time.
Lewis talks about how he was happy before he ever met H., but now happiness is hard to find (Lewis 2). This makes so much sense to me now. I went through eighteen years of my life, happy, before I met Dallas. I’ve only known him for four years, but he has changed me so much that it is hard to find happiness in life right now. At the end of April, I should have been excited about graduation coming up, but I was not because Dallas and Nate weren’t walking across the stage and getting their diplomas in front of me. On top of struggling to find happiness, Lewis talks about the laziness of grief (Lewis 3). I can understand this idea because accomplishing anything since the accident has been hard. At the end of the semester, I was working to write the final literature paper for almost a week, and my motivation and brain power were next to none. There were brief moments of clarity as I went through the day where I was able to write a paragraph or a few sentences, but not for very long. Trauma theory says that going through these emotions are part of the trauma and that they will happen again and again.
Even during the process of healing, the grief still comes up and repeats itself again and again. The first stage of healing appears when Lewis finally gets a good night’s sleep after not sleeping well for many weeks (Lewis 44), and he begins to feel slightly better from the rest. This is something that I can relate to more than I ever thought I would. The night that my friends passed away, I was only able to sleep for about an hour, and after that it took over a week before I finally was able to sleep through the night. But after I was able to sleep for more than an hour at a time, I did start to feel a little bit better, and then the nights brought more and more sleep with them. The other aspect of the healing process that Lewis describes is after he was feeling better and getting back into the routine of everyday life, a grief almost as strong as his initial feelings swept over him all over again (Lewis 56). This is something I don’t think I have really experienced yet. I wake up feeling okay, and then grief sweeps over me later in the day or the next day, but it is still a very recent grief, making me think that I’m still not out of the initial grief, as Lewis was when he wrote that section of the book. This is what makes me most nervous about living by myself this summer in an area where I don’t have a lot of friends. Right now, I am dealing with my grief okay, but what about this summer when I’m alone and a wave hits and takes me back to how I felt on April 20?
As I mentioned above, the last time I wrote about A Grief Observed, I focused on Lewis’ statement that losing a leg is very different than losing an appendix (Lewis 52). In her writing on trauma, Cathy Caruth discussed the idea that trauma is a wound of the mind, which “is not, like the wound of the body, a simple and healable event, but rather an event that […] is experienced too soon, too unexpectedly, to be fully known” (Caruth 4). When I think about these two ideas, from the different authors, it really relates trauma and grief into one idea showing that grief is an example of trauma. The experience of going through trauma, or grief in the case of Lewis and myself, is a difficult thing to heal, and the process of going through this trauma is the true trauma. When I found out that Dallas and Nate were gone, it felt like how I imagine waking up without a leg would feel. I have had to relearn how to do a lot of things since that night. Much like the removal of an appendix is a small inconvenience generally, losing a leg takes a long time to heal: a small incision in the abdomen compared to a larger wound or amputation. Yet as Caruth explains, the body heals faster than the mind.
As I look back on my first reading of A Grief Observed, I realize that grief is a funny thing. You never know how true grief will affect you, until you are drowning in your grief. In my case, I had lost my great-grandparents in the last few years, and I was sad, but none of that sadness compares to the grief of losing people your age, in your own class. Nor does it compare to losing someone you have done all aspects of life with for the last four years. At the end of April, when I wrote my final essay for ENG373, I wrote: “Personally, I think one of the hardest aspects for me is that it has only, and yet already, been two weeks since the accident but it feels like a lifetime. I feel like I should be getting back into my usual life schedule, but I can’t.” Now, after more than two months, I can say what Lewis explained, that as you move back into your routine, grief arises at random times that is almost as unbearable as the initial pain. This is something that I can now understand and relate to more than I ever thought I would or could. I will be in the middle of the workday, or cooking dinner, and suddenly I am overwhelmed with the feelings I experienced in April after the crash.
No aspect of grief makes sense, but being able to go through the ideas that C.S. Lewis had after the passing of his wife, H., has really helped me understand and process what I have been feeling since Nate and Dallas died. Though it hasn’t made it any easier.
The Judson Mosaic 