This story would strike a chord with anyone (and I highly recommend it, by the way), but it especially was difficult for me to read at such an emotional time in my life. As I am too ill to leave my hotel room (at times) and feeling that I will never go back to Macedonia again, I am reading the poignant description of a young girl being raped and the life slowly squeezed out of her, line by line. It was horrible also because upon beginning the book you knew that her death was inevitable; as the neighbor calls out to her, lures her into his �hiding place�, you want to scream at her not to go, to run. But anguished, you can only read on as she calmly narrates her own cruel extinction, soothingly, as if she had made peace with it years before and you were the one upset about something.
I kept thinking back to the weeks before as my illness escalated and I told people about it, contacted the medical officer in Skopje. I thought, rewind, lie, find a way to stay a little longer. The thing that is kind of strange about the story is the fact that her death is only the beginning of the story; she continues to narrate for well over a decade as she watches her family back on earth deal with her death (her body is never found, as the killer dismembers her body, locks it in a metal safe, and puts it into a sinkhole at the end of town).
One thing that might be a little bit hard for people who haven�t read the story to believe is that the whole thing is really more about her life than it is about her death (although it takes her family a long time to really understand that). I guess I have to explain that in order to draw the comparison between her and me.
I am not saying that I feel like I was raped and murdered and then watched my family on the other side. I left Macedonia abruptly, unexpectedly, and then felt like I was breathing through a thin straw trying to make contact with everyone over there. I heard about the goings-on that I should have been involved in, I received pictures via e-mail of events that I had been invited to attend, I received well-wishes to recover from my illness from volunteers who I always thought would be together at the end for our close of service conference. I heard from Macedonian friends of mine and volunteers who had met them through me, that they had seen each other, and that all was well, and I felt deep pangs of envy and regret (amidst my obvious happiness that they were well, I might add).
Maybe it�s that I felt like Nikola, Pehcevo, and Peace Corps Macedonia might as well have been on another planet. I could picture everything so clearly in my mind, but there was no way, in my state, that I could have gotten there. I felt such a loss and grief, just like the main character in �The Lovely Bones� did � in fact, her spirit even found some ways to break through, and at one point, years and years after her death, she trades places with her old school friend, albeit briefly, to experience her first sexual encounter with a boy she had loved on earth.
There was a strange dimension to the story � an overlap with her actual life on earth and her fantasies/dreams of how things could have been. As she continued to insert herself into the lives of her family, on and on years after she was already gone, I was left with a tearing, bittersweet feeling that she should let go and stay out of things down there. I recall thinking that I didn�t want to be so involved in my Peace Corps service after it had already ended that I paved over the actual memories with my dreams of how things could have been, and made it into something that it was not.
NOT that I don�t want to still be involved with the people that I met while I was there � but rather that I had to do it in a healthy way, and not to live vicariously through other volunteers or imagine that I was still there (and thus perpetuate my sadness and prolong my acceptance of the reality). I also have to ask myself � would I be this sad about it if I had stayed until my actual (and some would argue, arbitrary) close of service date, or would I have processed everything in its due time and moved on with my life, without looking back the rest of my life? Is the grass always greener on the other side of the fence? While I was in Macedonia I shunned the promaja, sometimes said the rakija was too strong to drink, and frequently avoided using the language, while in the U.S. I informed everyone about the supposed dangers of promaja, loved the rakija, and enjoyed using Macedonian or Serbian phrases others didn�t understand!!
I am sure it will take me a while to deal with my grief and bitterness about the way my service is ending, as could be normally expected. But at least when I look back �at earth�, I won�t see my fractured family unable to deal with my death, entirely ripped apart. I will see the people who I, hopefully, inspired, befriended, encouraged and motivated, and gave ideas to during my time there, and there will still be little signs that I was there as the years march on, even if I were never to set foot there again.