FATHER SEEKS MEANING TO DAUGHTER'S TRAGIC DEATH.

Byline: Richard Nemec

I passed another personal milestone recently, marking a bland birthday with my wife in a quiet day of shopping, moviegoing and dinner at the frenetic, funky Beverly Center, a place I usually shy away from more with each passing year. I feel more and more estranged from the human race whenever I tackle this trendy shopping complex's daunting parking lots or cavort among its hard-bodied young denizens.

Nevertheless, since I am hiding and searching simultaneously this summer, hoping no one - not even God - notices that I am a year older, the Beverly Center seemed like a good place for someone of my Vietnam-era generation to hide out. I forgot that you can't hide from yourself, however.

Thus, I probably did more searching than I wanted to. And I still am as the knowledge of being one year deeper into my 50s fades. I am looking for some sign or small revelation that will provide a few crumbs worth of meaning for the tragic killing of my 25-year-old daughter, Kristen, on a Manhattan street Memorial Day weekend. Her death unfortunately has irrevocably transformed a lot of us, and left us asking: ``Why?''

Consequently, I stare a lot these days - at every young woman's face who crosses my path. At every tragic killing or automobile fatality reported in the media. At every church service I now attend regularly, and every flower I put in the vase at my daughter's still-unmarked grave.

So far, three months after her death, I can find nothing that tells me why a young woman who had just completed the first year of a two-year master's degree program in engineering at Virginia Polytechnic University and who had just celebrated as a beautiful bridesmaid at a sorority sister's wedding the evening before in New York City, was suddenly cut down in the prime of her life.

Of course, I now know in stark detail that death is all around us. And violent death at the hands of one of our fellow humans is equally pervasive. We read, hear and see it all the time, but until it takes one of our loved ones, it does not become part of our daily living.

So, I repeatedly ask myself: Is one meaning from this tragedy the undeniable fact that death is as much a part of life as our breathing and our constant bickering?

As a father who now visits a cemetery daily and sees the unrelenting flow of two, three or four funerals daily (except Sunday), who witnesses the many, many people of all ages who gather at grave sites to remember loved ones, I cannot now deny what I have spent much of my earlier life ignoring: life and death are inseparable.

With this new appreciation for a fact that should be obvious to everyone, where does that leave this planet's array of human friendships, of which my daughter enjoyed an abundant number. What good are friends who you leave behind when you die much too young?

My wife and I, blessed as we have been with a generous amount of good, kind family members and friends, have not been the ``friendly types,'' or the ``social butterflies'' among our set of acquaintances.

Suddenly, in the wake of our daughter's death, we have people of all ages and geographical areas calling and writing us, asking how we are doing, offering to help, saying some consoling words just at the intuitively best time (when we are feeling particularly low).

As more months and years separate Kristen's tragic killing and our pain, I am not sure it will be right or proper for so many of these people - many with young lives just getting started - to spend a lot of time mourning a loss that only becomes profound and everlasting for parents like ourselves and a few close loved ones. But for the immediate aftermath, these good people around the country have touched us very profoundly.

That sounds and feels like it provides some real meaning. It is a meaning that tells us that love comes from reaching out.

The saddest, toughest meaning, however, is the way in which the wholeness of life can be totally erased in one split second. So, thinking or worrying about tomorrow can be an incredibly futile act. None of us - even the kings, queens, princesses, presidents and celebrities that dot our cyberspace-laced world of modern medical miracles in the 1990s - are assured of our next tomorrow. And that being a fact that Kristen's death has reinforced, how do we put the same old spirit and passion into living for today?

Society and individuals need futures. They need the hope that the future brings. Death's future gives us only other-world, spiritual hope in a realm we can only vaguely speculate about or begin to comprehend.

My immediate future this year involves attending a memorial service for my daughter at the university campus in Virginia that turned out to be her last home. There will be some hope in the youth that we will encounter for a brief moment back there.

Then, my wife and I plan to travel to New York City to visit some of Kristen's friends, talk to the prosecutor involved in her case and visit the scene of the hit-and-run killing.

I hope to find some meaning in these meanderings, but I am not counting on it. It hurts to admit to this cynicism, but then again, it might hurt more if I tried to pretend it didn't exist. Hope is a four-letter word that I am trying to relocate in a world that now has a limited vocabulary for me.