A couple streets over from my office, near the southeast corner of a city block that’s come to be known in recent years as Library Square, there stands a small, makeshift memorial. You know the sort of thing I’m talking about, a pair of wood scraps fastened together to form a cross, then draped in flowers and colorful plastic beads. Crosses like this are all over the place if you pay attention, alongside streets and roads and highways, marking places where somebody’s loved one met their destiny while behind the wheel of a car, and often at the hands of another driver. The one at Library Square is at the spot where my coworker Julie Ann Jorgenson’s car came to rest after it was slammed from behind by a speeding truck a few months ago.

I didn’t know this marker was there until just a couple days ago. My father drove past it at some point and asked me if it could be related to my “friend from work.” He didn’t finish the rest of that thought, “the one who got killed.” He didn’t have to. I knew immediately who he meant, and figured that yes, the marker was probably for her.

Yesterday afternoon, I took a little stroll during my free time. I didn’t plan on going to Library Square, but somehow that’s where I ended up, kneeling before this tiny structure underneath a gorgeous blue sky. I gently rubbed the petal of a bloom as I read Julie’s name, painted in light blue letters along the cross-bar. I don’t know what I expected to feel… a resurgence of the surprisingly intense grief I experienced when I first heard the news, or a sense of relief, or maybe some sense of Julie herself, a lingering whiff of her spirit… something. But the truth is, I didn’t really feel anything. I wondered who had placed the marker here, and how long the city will allow it to remain. I took a guess at who is changing out the wilted flowers for fresh ones. And I shook my head for the hundredth time at the vast, stupid, cosmic waste. But I didn’t feel anything. It bothers me.

In a related note, I had a Google alert waiting when I got home last night, notifying me that Julie’s killer, Shane Roy Gillette, is scheduled for a hearing to determine his mental competency. So this is going to be his defense? Incompetency? He was pretty damn incompetent the morning he killed a vibrant young woman, wasn’t he?

And so it goes, as Vonnegut wisely observed…