On Knowing Woody Indirectly

Passage from a letter by a woman whose son Woody cared for

>
> It's funny how you can not know a person and yet be
> incredibly affected by his death.  If anyone remembers
> when Kennedy was shot, you must recall that EVERYONE
> cried.  He was just so loveable and so unique.  He
> resonated with people.  It felt like the world changed
> that day.innocence was again lost and again  the world
> became markedly, palpably, more sinister.
>
> Perhaps it was because Woody died so close on the
> heels of national disaster that his death was so
> incredibly poignant to those who care about Justice
> for Woody (which to me means protecting victims).
> Perhaps it marked a gut-felt sense that the tendency
> towards reactive, intollerant, and fascist self
> righteousness had actualized in my own life through
> one who was a friend to my own son, Julian. I'd not
> been as personally whammied by the events of September
> Eleventh.  I was horrified but not gulping tears, at
> least, not after a couple of days.
>
> If Woody's energy was a ripple, then others who didn't
> know him but felt the dramatic loss none-the-less,
> must have felt it on some level.  If his
> free-spiritedness was somehow making the world a freer
> place, they/we must have felt it when it was taken
> away.  Who knows how far our acts and deeds resonate
> out into the world?  Who knows if we are really all
> that separate, as we imagine ourselves to be?
>