This week, the murder case of Stephanie Hummer has ended, with Jonathan Gravely getting sentenced 25 years to life for raping her, then murdering her. 

Stephanie Hummer graduated from Finneytown High School in 1993, and I did, too.

Stephanie sat behind me in my senior year psychology class.  I barely knew her, as we ran in vastly different social circles, but I do remember borrowing sheets of paper from her on occasion. 

I also remember that she was the force behind getting our yearbook together.  She included a page with a picture of a lonely road and an excerpt of poetry, bearing her signature.  I remember the first time I saw that page after her death; it came across like some kind of foreshadowing.  I can’t find my yearbook anymore, but I remember that eerie page.

Finneytown’s class of ‘93 has had its share of deaths.  Another guy I went to school with—Marcus Forte—was found bound and gagged in a river.  If memory serves, when police found a suspect in his murder case, the guy shot himself in the head when cops arrived at his house.

Then there was the widely publicized situation with Keith Desserich’s daughter, Elena.  She had a rare “diffuse brain stem glioma.” I remember running into Keith a few years ago, at the Cincinnati Children’s Museum.  It was probably just before his daughter got diagnosed.  He, too, was in Finneytown’s class of 1993.

So it was probably some vague and unformed musings about the death of Stephanie Hummer which caused me to visit the graves of my grandmother and grandfather the other day—my first visit since my grandmother died about one year ago. 

I stood there, gazing upon the faint rectangular outlines in the grass which still indicate the placement of their coffins.  I considered how I was standing on earth above the corpses of two of the people responsible for my existence.  I thought about all the people who ultimately led to my being, then gazed at the perfectly blue morning sky and remembered about how utterly small I am in the scope of our strange and expansive universe.

Sometimes, I think it’s natural for people to consider the effect they have on the world—on the people they know, on their environment, and so forth.  But other times, I sense a strange futility when our individual and grandiose expectations get juxtaposed with the brevity of life, the inescapable fact of mortality, the ever-growing timeline on which are own lives are indiscernible marks, and the enormity of existence itself—forever threatening to make absurd through sheer smallness even our greatest of plans.

Somehow, it is that final thought that always causes me to laugh.  For reasons I cannot quite articulate, I find the notion of such absurdity hilarious, even comforting.

So it was with a strange sort of smile—the facts of which I can barely put to words—that I found myself walking from the graves of some of my makers, reflecting on the lives of those I have known, who are no more.

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