Thoughts on Newtown, CT

Now we see the headlines go a bit deeper into details.  TV shows, news programs, even comedy genre, pay moving tributes to the victims – all the victims, not just those physically taken away from this world, but those left behind.  The news stories slowly recede, the questions still linger, and Facebook posts start, little by little, to pry into the routine and silly stuff of life.  To see if it’s safe to come out yet.

We grieve and continue to try to understand why a horrific tragedy has occurred.  The experts spew theories and the heartsick call for gun control. We wonder why semi-automatic’s are sold and sometimes, we shake our heads, secure in knowing that we are never, ever completely free from evil acts, that there’s no such thing as certain safety.  We have learned from experience to wrap up heartache and move through tasks for survival.  But in the quiet moments, we still feel that awful and now familiar pit of darkness and feel the wetness come to our eyes for children we didn’t know but cry for, just the same.  It does feel like they were all our children.  We cry for their parents and families, for their grandparents who surely wish they could have traded places with those cherished little children, for a community whose normal-ness is a reminder that violence and cruelty can happen on any street, in any building, born in a sick-enough head.  We are scared and we are scarred from this.  The imagination cannot stretch far enough to figure out how, exactly, the victims and loved ones, now including an entire nation and maybe the world, can move through this to do life again.

That becomes our task.  The task of comfort, the task of action, the task of repair.  And it seems incumbent upon us to not let this and other useless, deeply wasteful events pass without pulling out the task of finding life more precious.  We learn that we have just this moment in time.  We hope for more.  Our inner voices tell us to hug more, love more, gripe less – sadly, not quite as easy as it sounds.  Yet in the midst of searching for answers, and finding there may be few, the only one we know is that love is never wasted.

And that answer may have to be good enough.