at the corner

so last night, I got a text from my pastor and facebook messages from some people who go to an awesome church on the corner of Scranton and Clark that they were going to be doing a prayer vigil thing at the corner of Scranton and Seymour, just a block or so north, so I ended up going down there to show some solidarity, to give comfort, to listen, even though the introvert in me wasn't sure if I even belonged there, because I want to respect that people are trying to live their lives and stuff and not become part of the inevitable media circus. Whether I did or not is up for others to judge if they want.

I drive over and I can already tell it's going to be crazy when I get off the exit and there's hundreds of motorcycles roaring down 25th, handmade signs thanking God for this miracle, people in the streets everywhere like it's 4th of July or something. I park in the church lot and walk over, and it's quiet over here, I see a few people I know that I haven't seen in a couple years since me and the roommate fell out and I dropped out of that social circle, but a commonality of belief and vision makes it seem like days. It is quiet over on our side, except for people praying and singing on the steps of a church at the corner.

Most of them are more charismatic than me, so I don't get too loud, it's hard enough to string coherent thoughts together with the emotions so overwhelming and I find myself grieving that this took ten years and that there's so many others who've gone missing, and that awful things happen to women in this city and around the world all the time. We pray for the girls, for the families, for the neighborhood, for the law enforcement that they would start doing their job in a way that doesn't hurt others, for the men themselves. A woman who says she's the aunt of the one of the girls asks us to pray for the Castro family because of the pain they're dealing with and the inevitable blowback to come.
 

And there were so many news cameras and vehicles everywhere and people with their cameras gawking and taking pictures of everything with their iPhones and people just kind of milling around who were hoping to get interviewed. Neighbors sitting on porches observing, people riding by on their bikes,  I've never been around that kind of thing really and to see the level of production, the incongruity of impeccable broadcasters and us regular folk. 

There are four of us left hanging out in a parking lot under the stars, trying to figure out what we could and should be doing, because these emotions subside, but we live here, this is where we need to be connected and trying to love, and trying to figure out how to do that more.
 

house of mourning

It is better to go to a house of mourning than to go to a house of feasting, for death is the destiny of every man; the living should take this to heart.

I came from work pretty much, finding my way to a small funeral home on Lorain wondering at first what I was doing here, until there were some familiar faces. I'm so used to the Catholic way of doing this things, but someone sang a gospel song and then a couple pastors spoke and everyone fanned themselves with their programs and babies cried, the place was packed out with family and friends. I wondered if there was any point in being there, but as I talked to the few I did know, I realized that sometimes just being there, being willing to listen and sometimes hug, might be what the point of this is. These are for the living after all.

It's hard for me to look at the despirited body like an empty shell, and her family crying in the front row, we return to the church for a meal and then people sing her favorite songs and tell stories and remember her. People talk about her garden and the way she played the guitar and her struggles that are now over. There's a whole tapestry of family history unfurling in front of me, and being somewhat outside the immediate orbit, I wish now that I could have celebrated with her more in life than remembering what little scraps I have after she's gone.

There's a part of me that's still extremely shy and somewhat skittish, I don't even know where to start with people sometimes, and I don't know if the invitations of hospitality are true or just talk, and in her case it seems they were true. It's been a week, maybe even a summer of grieving for a lot of people in my world, losing friends and their friends losing kids, and kids losing parents. I look at her parents and wonder what it's like to bury a daughter. It makes me realize that I need to love more, that somewhere in the last few years I've lost some of the generous spirit that I once had, because getting burned will do that, but to do more, be more, than I was.