Dear reader,
I’ll keep it short, sweet and to the point this week.
There’s really no need to ramble on about the topic, nor linger on the morbid, but it needs to be broached none the less.
The death of a loved one is the most painful experience most human beings will ever endure – it is an experience that I am sure nearly all human beings share.
Not only is the loss of a loved one communal, but the feeling of loss is universal – celebrated and mourned by bards such as Shakespeare and Thomas and Byron – and feared in its entirety.
On Saturday, March 30, I attended the scene of a fatal accident between a motorcyclist and a jogger.
Immediately, and almost without hesitation, opinions started streaming in about who was wrong – who could be blamed for the tragedy.
But does it matter?
Sure, I agree that in legal discourse we will always debate the extent of liability – and there is merit in doing so for fiduciary claims; but not when measuring the pain of the loss of a human life.
There is no measure for the tears of a daughter who has lost a father, or the pitch of a mother’s scream that has lost a child.
Nonetheless, I believe anger is a natural reaction to loss.
The ability to see the world in black and white – to understand justice and injustice – is a uniquely human gift. When faced with an injustice, we immediately seek a perpetrator.
A thief of joy. However, death does not discriminate.
Death does not need a villain to play his hand in its dealings – nor is every heroic action enough to stave it off.
Death does not take those who were deserving and leave those with malicious intentions, nor does death take God’s most beautiful children first (as the churches love to propagate) – the truth is, death doesn’t discriminate.
It’s really not that personal.
It’s a wrong-place-at-the-wrong-time thing.
There’s no reason or rhyme to most of it, and the older I get the more I understand that as normal as anger is – it is better to take a step back, and instead of comparing the loss in your hand to that in another’s, to rather say “we both bare the weight of this loss, and that – like oxen shackled to the plough – makes us brothers.”
Anxiously yours,
Aimee
