Nicole

Death. It comes in the oddest ways and at the oddest times. Nicole was the Emerson grad killed in New York this past week—it’s been on the news channels, the Internet, the subject of e-mails. She’s gone from being the driven, talented artist I knew in Boston to a New York cause and a symbol of tragedy in one of the world’s biggest cities.

I knew her briefly—in the grand scheme of my life she would be part of sentence, someone who was involved in a theatre group that I was on the sidelines of. Someone with whom Heather put on “Taming of the Shrew”, a fellow acting major and friend of sorts—I was not a fan though I did respect her goals.

It’s always weird when someone you know dies. I’ve had very little experience with it outside of several family members, most of whom I don’t remember because I was so young when they passed. It’s hard when it’s a peer, even harder when it is one that you had problems with, tension, someone that for whatever reason was cut from your life.

This brings me to Jacintha. She was apart of my LA social life, someone who I partied with, took trips to Vegas and even danced with. She passed away a while ago under strange circumstances that I have never understood and someone with whom I had bad blood.

It was over something huge at the time, in the aftermath of Kelly and Ty’s breakup, when we stopped speaking. She was upset with a handful of us over an event and set mean spirited e-mails and I called her on it. I was furious when we last spoke and I did everything but curse her out completely during the last conversation we had. And while I still stand behind the reasoning at the time—to this day my words haunt me.

This made it even harder when she died—I felt such a guilt come over me that I had been that way to her. Hindsight is 50/50 and to this day I take pause when I deal with the little petty dramas that compose my life at points. It amazes me how much one loss, however small, can make one change their relationships with so many.

And as I watch and hear about Nicole’s death and the feelings that will continue to emerge I hope that people aren’t too hard on themselves about the past. The one thing I came to realize was that my relationship with Jacintha, the bad points included, was that it was mostly likely not something that kept her awake at night. It was a point in time for us both and smaller than a footnote in the grand scheme of things.

I’d like to believe that Jacintha wouldn’t want me to beat myself up and that Nicole would want the same thing for any of us. I think that both would want to be remembered for who they tried to be and at their happiest. Jacintha off filming things, taking pictures and Nicole on stage performing or behind the scenes with her scripts both trying to make art but also a difference.