Even the Golden Ones

In the movies an acceptance to Princeton is like being conferred knighthood. For the rest of your life, you will be above the common serfs, and you will now cruise through life utterly untroubled, with every golden door held open just for you.

I picked up a slim booklet on a table after a party. The next group to use the space was the class of 1984, for a memorial service. 29 members of that class and the others near it were now dead.

There has been no major war since the now departed were 22 years-old. Just life's ordinary casualties. Though you wouldn't know it from TV, not everyone makes it to their 70s.

It reminded me of when Alison Fraker, the most beautiful girl in my high school class, died in a car accident while still in college. An earthly angel had somehow departed. Beauty is fragile, though we connote it with strength of character and will and even with immortality. Think of JFK Jr. or Princess Diana.

So are the deaths of these people, the supposedly best and the brightest, more tragic than that of inner-city teenagers? More than 30 died in just the last school year in Chicago. The common refrain that was doubtlessly said of the Princetonians was that "they had so much to live for."

I learned from the booklet that there is now a class of 1984 stone placed on Nassau Hall, the 1755 main building of campus. Ashes to ashes, dust to stone.