The Kid Next Door

originally published March 12, 2008

Eve Carson lived so fully and intensely that her death illuminates like an X-ray the infrastructure that encompassed her: the family who loved and guided her, surrounded by the neighborhood that provided an extended family, the friendships reaching all over town, the schools that taught her and learned from her; the teachers who delighted in her. Nurtured and taught as she was, profiting from her immersion in this familiar world, she left home with such a force of energy and personality that she could replicate this structure at a distant college, capturing its heart and personifying its spirit.

Those circles of supportive people wonder and grieve and will forever mourn the loss of their golden girl, who got life right: who grew into a perfect storm of intelligence, ability, dedication, hard work, happiness and selfless regard for other people.

Eve personified the neighborhood where she grew up. Cobbham is a well-to-do in-town white area, but it is no gated enclave. Cobbham is a community of curious, loquacious, energetic extraverts who live close together but call all Athens home, who count on one another for friendship, babysitting, front-porch visits and news, with children playing on the lawn. But they work all over town in the civic, business, educational and cultural life of their city, volunteering their evenings and weekends to help other people get by or to get somebody elected to improve local government.

Cobbham, though distinct in its own personality, is in many ways typical of the neighborhoods of Athens that make our town a special place to live - neighborhoods characterized by close-knit relations but turned outward to the larger community, involved in it and working to improve the whole town.

Reared in such a milieu by her smart, tough, caring family with their own traditions of hard work and community service, Eve Carson was a natural. She excelled in school, she made friends easily, she looked out for other people: she lived as she was shown by example how life should be lived. We are all richer for her life, and we are all poorer for its end.

Our town has been wracked, lately and always, by the deaths of beloved and promising young men and women - by accident, sickness, suicide, drugs, war, murder. These young deaths rock our community like bomb blasts, the closer in family and friendship the greater the devastation. Their loss leaves emptiness that cannot be filled, sadness that sits continuously in the hearts of those who love them.

Now death has come to Eve Carson and to Athens. We cannot comprehend how this has happened, how violent murder could strike so suddenly one so fully engaged in living. With time will come a longer view, a grasp that her life, though short, was fulfilled. We will come to be reminded that the truism is true: that the quality of life is what counts and that we all should live as she did, filling each day to the fullest, living life in each moment, regardless of its extent.

Thus are Eve and her friends and compatriots and peers our inspiration in the present and our hope for the future.

"The greatest generation?" Eve's father Bob Carson said, standing surrounded by loving, grieving friends and neighbors. "It's not their grandfathers. It's these kids. They're the greatest generation. We've got some messes to clean up, and they're the ones who can do it, who will do it."

Pete McCommons

editor@flagpole.com