Student Views

It’s been almost two months since Southwestern was caught off guard, since a beautiful light was extinguished, since SU senior Rob Atkinson was killed in a car accident. A couple other bloggers have written about it, I think, but his absence is still such a part of my everyday experience that I don’t think I could write this entry about anything else.

Please pardon my words, though, because it’s still so hard to find the right ones to express it.

Immediately after news spread about the accident, people gathered at the Kappa Sigma house to cry, hug, laugh and tell Rob stories. The next day, the school organized a session where people shared stories, both sad, inspirational, hilarious and ridiculous.

Rob was a unique person, to say the least. He inspired almost everyone he met, and I promise I’m not exaggerating. His enthusiasm for every aspect of his life was contagious. It was rare to find him complaining. In fact, I probably can’t count the times he told me to chill out while mocking my stress level. He had a level of self-understanding and spiritual peace that you rarely find in anyone, much less a 21 year old.

He had a passion for peace-building that was hard to escape — mostly because he wouldn’t let you. Rob believed so strongly in the Student Peace Alliance and the idea of creating a US Department of Peace that if you knew him at all, you probably knew all about HR 808, the bill that proposes the creation of the Department of Peace.

Rob was an incredibly strong presence on this campus and so for about a week after the accident, the school went into a funk that I cannot begin to describe. Yet even through the fog of mourning, I couldn’t help but think about how thankful I was/am to be in the midst of this particular community.

I know that at any other school, we would have been expected to continue with life as scheduled. But here, professors were notified the very next morning after his death and they allowed many students to take extensions on final papers and exams. They responded immediately with words of encouragement, comfort and love. I couldn’t be more appreciative of the support all of Rob’s friends received from the Southwestern community.

This is definitely the most intense experience of loss I’ve been through throughout my short life. I’ve experienced the death of family members, but they died at ages that make sense. Rob was taken too young and with so much potential to change the world.

So, even though I don’t have a whole lot to compare it to, I feel like the experience of Rob’s death and the community reaction to it is incredibly singular. Which in a large part is due to Rob’s singularity.

Rob’s light, rather than dimming with his passing, has instead been even more illuminated. The campus has been aflame with Rob’s passion for peace, for life, for living. His Kappa Sigma brothers, his friends, his professors, people he might have only met once — they are all attempting to live Rob’s spirit, to make a positive change in the world around them, to be truly themselves, to be good to each other, to live, to love, to experience life.

I can truly say that our community has grown stronger, not because of Rob’s death but because of his life. His strength and passion has spread and has multiplied, has been infused into every person he met and has made each of us more keenly aware of ourselves and our affects on the people immediately surrounding us as well as those throughout the world.

I miss Rob a lot and I always will. I’ll still expect to see him at the Sig House, on my couch, at SPA meetings or calling me on the phone. But as cliche as it sounds, I know he wouldn’t want me focusing on his death for too long. That would be a waste of time, you see. He would rather us get to work improving our world, doing our best to make the difference that he had planned on making, affecting the changes he hoped to see. We have some big shoes to fill, a legacy to live up to.

Now is the worst possible time to dwell on our own sorrows. Now is the time to act, to affect, to change. Because it’s only through living Rob’s light that we can escape the darkness of our loss.