Saturday, December 15, 2012

Connecticut in My Heart

“I am learning to see. I don't know why it is, but everything enters me more deeply and doesn't stop where it once used to. I have an interior that I never knew of... What's the use of telling someone that I am changing? If I'm changing, I am no longer who I was; and if I am something else, it's obvious that I have no acquaintances. And I can't possibly write to strangers.” ― Rainer Maria Rilke, from The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

So, Connecticut.

When I was putting my son down in his bassinet yesterday morning after feeding him, hoping to steal a couple more hours of sleep, a young man was murdering twenty children and several more adults at the elementary school that has now earned the kind of fame that no one wants.

Nearly thirty dead, twenty of them children, suddenly, senselessly.

How are we supposed to live in a world where things like this happen, and happen often?

As a person who has experienced the sudden and senseless death of her own child (although not at the hands of another, thank God), this tragedy has hit me hard. It has entered me deeply, as Rilke wrote. Because I know too well at least some of what those children's parents are feeling, will feel forever, and the knowing makes me feel physically ill. December 14, 2012 is a date now seared into those families' brains, the day that their lives were brutally delineated into Before and After.

I wish I didn't know this.

It hurts my heart. It hurts to know what kind of battle those Connecticut families have been forced to fight. It hurts to know how the rage and fear that grief brings will now mark their every hard-drawn breath. How the person each of them once was is gone forever, gunned down alongside their children. And it hurts to understand that because my own daughter's death was relatively merciful, I don't know the half of it.

There is nothing that can be said, no comfort to offer these parents that words can spell. All I can say is - I'm sorry. I am so, so sorry, you Newtown families. It is not right, that you are going through what no one should ever have to.

I grieve with you and for you. I am praying that God will meet you here, in the midst of this terrible, unfair trial. My hope is that you can bind together in the face of your mutual losses, that you can become a community of grievers and find some measure of healing in that, and in Him.

This world is a horror sometimes.

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5 comments:

  1. Beth,
    I live minutes from where this senseless act of violence occured. I comment the same on both your's and Fran's much needed posts this morning...this town, this state, this world and most of all these families are forever broken. There is a hush heard all around the world today...

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  2. I lit a candle and am breathing and whispering my love.

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  3. My heart is broken... I, too am praying for those forever changed. I have no words...just love, prayers, and hope in Him.

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  4. <3 your words and picture have done well here, in a brokenhearted place, Beth <3

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"I am glad you are here with me."
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King