Last week was a tough week for Wisconsin students. We lost one of our own. Even those of us who never met her somehow felt a connection to her.
Maybe it happened as we locked our doors an hour before we usually would or avoided late nights at the library that would force us to walk home alone.
Maybe we thought about Brittany Zimmermann when we sat in lecture realizing she sat in these same chairs, contemplating complicated math formulas or classic literature only days before.
No matter when it happened or under what circumstances, I think we all felt something. We felt her and realized how close we could come to the memory of someone we never met.
I never met Brittany Zimmermann. I don't know if she was a party girl or a homebody. I don't know how many siblings she had. I don't know how she ended up at Wisconsin.
I don't know if we would have hit it off and become friends if we had met or just written each other off like we do with 95 percent of the people we cross paths with on this campus.
But there are a few things I can assume. She probably waited impatiently at the Park and University intersection when she was late for class.
She probably hoped for the e-mail announcing classes were cancelled during the blizzards earlier this year. She was once new here, probably wondering where she would fit in with the rest of us.
These little, almost insignificant things make her seem more like a real person than another tragic news story. She seems more real to us than the victims at Virginia Tech and Northern Illinois University. But all of them seemed this way to people close to them too.
The truth is, hypothetically, going a year in the United States without any random tragedies such as this one seems almost inconceivable.
Tragic stories we hear on the news are awful and horrifying, but they're not unique. In fact, they're expected. We expect to hear heart-wrenching stories every year but we just don't expect them to hit so close to home.
What we often forget is all of the other tragedies we hear about happened at someone else's school, in someone else's neighborhood and to someone else's friend.
We hear about the details - the when, where and how - but we don't hear about that person's favorite shirt, her tendency to bite her nails when she was thinking hard about something or the episode of a TV show that always made her laugh.
All of these people were close to people who loved them. And all of their stories affected the people around them who may not have known them, just like Brittany's has affected us.
Tragedies like this happen every year, so consistently in fact, that some mathematician could probably calculate the odds of it happening to us.
When these disasters happen, we often look at them as numbers, such as how many times it has happened this year and how much crime has occurred in that area.
Statistically speaking, something like this shouldn't happen to us. It should happen to someone else. But this was also true for Brittany, rendering all numbers and equations useless for the people who knew and loved her.
Maybe we should take a look at the numbers and the larger scale that puts crime into context. But I think it's more important to remember that she's more than a black-and-white photo on the front page of the newspaper or a warning to lock our doors at night. She encompassed a unique combination of little things, like we all do, that make a person who she is. She was one of us.
E-mail Kiera at wiatrak@wisc.edu.
