Community Mourning- Kim Family
Now the news engines have started analyzing their own traffic hits and how that’s news, in some postmodern metatextual way.
I haven’t heard of the wake yet- but I hope there is something. I went to the gym on Wednesday when Kati Kim was found, and it was on everyone’s mind, that James Kim be found too. You didn’t really have to break in with a “are you following the Kim family?” because everybody was.
At work, a guy two cubes away from me, we would catch up on the news in the cafeteria. It’s like, a constant newsfeed of information. We all were affected in some way- either we had experience there, we had dependents and worried “what if…” a 3 hour tour went longer, or we had gone to their stores, new people who knew people, watched James on tv… It didn’t help that I was watching Lost obsessively too. Reading of the media frenzy going on there, it made you kind of self-conscious about tracking someone else’s tragedy, but in a way, don’t a ton of prayers from our little city help in situations like this? (if you are religious, that is.) I had a long conversation with my brother who has search & rescue experience, and lives in the Pacific NorthWest, and we evaluated in minute detail most of the evidence and probabilities. At dinner two nights ago four of us went over all of our mountaineering experiences- the helicopter saves, the “crazy man coming out of the woods lost” stories. It was therapeutic in the way that going over a car crash with a CSI team can help demystify it. I can’t help it, but there are niggly little questions: did they have FasTrak? Why don’t we close off dangerous roads? But in all, it’s just a sad chapter closing- for the viewing public, that is, not the Kim family. My hopes and prayers go out to them.
To Nicole and others that were close- I’m sorry for your loss. Friends of the Kim family have setup a site for donations.
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His name was James.
Ah, thanks. Wrote a paper in college on J.S. Mill and got his name wrong the entire way through- J.M Mill (ugh, the memory makes me cry). Peter’s a friend of mine, OK I feel lame.
This family’s tragic story touched so many people, both for who they are in their (our) community, and for the plight they endured, which all of us can relate to, in at least fearing the possibility of it on one road trip or another.
I’m planning my own winter camping trip for the week btwn xmas and nye (and I don’t mean to be the least bit disrespectful) I know that in the midst of being surrounded by the still beauty of the wilderness, I’ll be thinking of that family’s ordeal, and wishing them peace.