“A Single Person is Missing for You, and the Whole World is Empty”

I am so reluctant to get too heavy here…a place where people come to find positivity and beautiful things only. But I can’t ignore the sadness that is all around us right now and feel it would be dishonest of me to post on something else. It would be a complete fake.

(image 1000 candles by artist William Mackrell)

“We are imperfect mortal beings, aware of that mortality even as we push it away, failed by our very complication, so wired that when we mourn our losses we also mourn, for better or for worse, ourselves. as we were. as we are no longer. as we will one day not be at all.” – Joan Didion

The echoes of this terrible day bounce around my head… and the idea of the grief these families must feel- just the tinge, just the outer wrapper of it, is so unbearable. It’s as if you are wide open, completely exposed, and someone starts dropping large smooth rocks in, one at a time, dropping them in, and they knock together, weigh you down…make everything feel so heavy and far away. There is such sadness, maybe there is fury too, maybe there is just nothing.

Joan Didion wrote a book called “The Year of Magical Thinking” and she has such a plain and insightful way of explaining what loss was like for her:

“Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it. We anticipate (we know) that someone close to us could die, but we do not look beyond the few days or weeks that immediately follow such an imagined death. We misconstrue the nature of even those few days or weeks. We might expect if the death is sudden to feel shock. We do not expect this shock to be obliterative, dislocating to both body and mind. We might expect that we will be prostrate, inconsolable, crazy with loss. We do not expect to be literally crazy, cool customers who believe their husband is about to return and need his shoes.”

“In the version of grief we imagine, the model will be “healing.” A certain forward movement will prevail. The worst days will be the earliest days. We imagine that the moment to most severely test us will be the funeral, after which this hypothetical healing will take place. When we anticipate the funeral we wonder about failing to “get through it,” rise to the occasion, exhibit the “strength” that invariably gets mentioned as the correct response to death. We anticipate needing to steel ourselves the strength for the moment: will I be able to greet people, will I be able to leave the scene, will I be able even to get dressed that day? We have no way of knowing that this will not be the issue. We have no way of knowing that the funeral itself will be anodyne, a kind of narcotic regression in which we are wrapped in the care of others and the gravity and meaning of the occasion. Nor can we know ahead of the fact (and here lies the heart of the difference between grief was we imagine it and grief as it is) the unending absence that follows, the void, the very opposite of meaning, the relentless succession of moments during which we will confront the experience of meaninglessness itself.”

Maybe our collective grief over these lost children and their teachers will somehow help the families get through it. Maybe not forgetting, maybe not brushing this off as just another story that THANKFULLY did not happen to us, maybe showing a little extra love for each other, taking a little more time to be in the present, unplugging ourselves from devices and really relating to one another, maybe taking a walk with someone we love but don’t talk to as much as we should, maybe it’s painting with our kids and getting as messy as can be, maybe it’s laying on our back in the grass and dreaming about the possibilities, maybe it’s going out of our way to help a neighbor, or sitting down with pen and paper to write a note to our parents just because we never do that anymore, maybe it’s making sure we don’t take this amazing life we have for granted, maybe that would help a little…

Jessica

Avielle

Lauren

Mary

Victoria

Benjamin

Allison

Charlotte

Daniel

Rachel

Olivia

Josephine

Ana

Dylan

Dawn

Madeline

Catherine

Chase

Jesse

James

Grace

Anne

Emilie

Jack

Noah

Caroline

with love today to you and all your loved and cherished ones.
k