Klaas Jonkheid's Murder

I scan the internet hourly with searches like “Klaas Jonkheid murder latest”.
I am dissatisfied with everything that I read.
I can’t believe that I am writing ‘Jonkheid’ and ‘murder’ in the same phrase.
I have never known anyone who has been murdered, and never interrogated the word.
It is so different to ‘died’, even to ‘killed’: the word written to me in an email.
Klaas had been killed.
It wasn’t the right word: people are killed in car crashes and other accidents all the time.
A murder is a different thing, an immoveable thing, an act beyond reversal and without the mishap of accident.

Klaas would have understood my process: denial, bargaining, depression.
I would have found him patronizing.
I bargain with the internet every day, hoping to read something that will make the whole thing fall into place.
I am irritated with any group claiming his death as racist genocide or an indictment on national safety.
I haven’t faced up to the fact that context, even an eye-witness account or last words can’t undo what is done.
What is done, is the removal from the now of something and someone I took for granted.
A person so consistent in my landscape, so well established, that I had perceived them as invulnerable.

I am no stranger to the death of beloved friends.
And most of my friends are large personalities, ‘distinguished’ as the media insists he was, but not by accomplishment: by the willingness to live outside of what is accepted and acceptable, to live in a state of mental and spiritual youthfulness.
Klaas loved crisis, he loved it for its ability to renew.
He liked to use archetypes, ideas about fantasy and reality and other intellectual adventures I didn’t always trust.
For his own demons, Jack Daniels, his Harley and the voracious collection of obscure musicians connected him, I think, to the moment and to others.
I have him to thank for Nick Drake, Martha Wainwright, Regina Spektor, Ani diFranco, Imogen Heap, Brandi Carlile and countless other staples in my own music vocabulary.

I’ve been reading back through our intermittent, but consistent 5 year mail conversation, and found things that I had overlooked.
Klaas had loved The Little Prince.
I choose to remember him with words from the book:
“Only children know what they are looking for.”