I sat down to watch a Notre Dame football game, the day stretching out before me, hours of football, laundry, beer, and yard work. The kids will play and whine and try to get me to switch to the Wii. We’ll hang out here at home, and chill. Maybe Notre Dame won’t lose again.
But the opening of the game on NBC was a tribute to Declan Sullivan, a Notre Dame junior who died in an accident this week. They didn’t say how, so I Googled it, of course. Oh, good Lord.
For me, this is just like the time I read about the 6-year-old who fell from the top of a Ferris wheel to his death, where his mother waited below. The child died in her arms. He must have known terror on a scale you have never imagined as he plummeted to the blacktop. And so Declan, who feared his workday as a videographer atop a 31-foot hydraulic lift on an extremely windy day, must have known he was about to die. Indeed, news reports say that he tweeted his fear as the winds increased in severity while he was atop the lift.
Holy fucking shit. I mean really, people. That is all there is to say.
I’ve been watching Notre Dame games for the past five years with a mixture of frustration and pity. I want them to WIN GODDAMMIT. But I also feel bad for these poor kids who are thrust into the pressure cooker of American televised college football. There is so much money at stake for so many people, from TV execs to shareholders all the way down to the student managers who paint the helmets. I don’t know what they get now but when I was a manager, we at least got our books paid for, and if you’ve gone to college you know that those cost a lot of money. At least they used to before The Internets.
Once upon a time, these players were my peers. I had classes with them, I walked with them across campus, I worked with them. I could have crushes on them then, but now if that were true I would be a pedophile. Now, they are kids. I pity their mothers. I wonder how they get through all that pressure and manage to study and have social lives. I hope my kids go into golf or tennis and avoid the physical danger of football.
But good God. Dying because you were up too high on a windy day to videotape the practice? It’s a tragedy, a crime, and really bad fucking luck. Nobody should die for Notre Dame football. As much money and love there is surrounding it, it’s not worth a kid’s life. I can’t imagine what that phone call to his family was like.
I feel Declan’s death in my heart as a human, a mother, and a Notre Dame alumna. This is my family. This is the institution from which I received a great amount of my character. I can find “relatives” all over the world. This sense of belonging that we all get from the university is why we get so fired up about Obama speaking there, or the football team tanking year after year, or the death of one of us. Declan was one of us. He shouldn’t have died.
We all lost this week.
For more about the circumstances of the death of Declan Sullivan, see The Notre Dame campus newspaper, The Observer.
Declan died because the adults refused to be adults and make hard decisions. Yes, cancelling football practice — or taking it indoors — would have thrown off the scheduled plan a bit, but now a young man is dead. I just want someone to say, “We screwed up and we’re sorry.” Instead they are all sitting behind legalese and protecting themselves. In the end, Notre Dame is going to write a really, really big check to Declan’s family. The sad part is it’s only money. Some alum will cover it and Notre Dame won’t have learned a single lesson from this.