Life is a journey. From birth to inescapable, uncheatable, death. We accept this cycle of life and the orderly progression from youth to elderly to . . . nothingness or life everlasting, depending on one’s view and religion.
But what breaks a person’s (my) heart is knowing — however tangentially — parents who must bury their children, and grandparents unable to comprehend or comfort their own grieving children. Since the 1950s, the death of a child breaks social and religious compacts, both having evolved from greater longevity and higher standards of living. Not long ago, parents buried children in this country all too often. Still, as a parent, I cannot imagine the pain and grief of those parents, just as I cannot imagine the pain and grief of parents of a girl recently found dead in her dorm room at college.
A life and future snuffed out and a family in tatters. And, depending on the cause of death, other young lives guilty for not preventing the loss or complicit in causing the loss. I look back on my college years and wonder how I survived the colossally stupid things I did. I think about the way I cavalierly put my life and limb at risk in crazy, drunken escapades in the snowy mountains of New Hampshire. And, yet, I survived. Why?
There is no rhyme or reason to who lives and who dies, who is born into riches and who is mired in poverty and who is blessed and who cursed. Yes, biblical and epic struggles between humans and G-d are unleashed again in times of gut-wrenching sadness.
It is part of the human condition, I believe, to become inured to the death tolls in far-away Iraq and the famine in parts of far-away Africa, but be heart-sick at the death of a child barely considered “kin”. Maybe because I am a parent. Maybe because it didn’t happen in a faraway place or under circumstances outside my experiences. Maybe because in the America of my hopes and dreams — and those of my parents and grandparents — things like this don’t happen. The “shining beacon to the world” (if that is still true) is a little dimmed by each such senseless death.
There are many riffs on this — political, sociological, religious — but the fact remains that a young life is lost. And that is just too much. And, maybe we ought to think about every life this way. But for right now, I am thinking locally not globally.
I only hope that the family of this young girl find some form of peace in their lifetimes.
