bear with me here, or skip this.

quasi-political interjection, skip if you want
So tragedy is numbing to me at this point. We saw it on the news as it unfolded, I find myself more angry than sad, because while it's beyond tragic, I have far greater grief over my complicity in paying taxes that finance drones that kill kids in Pakistan and Yemen and God knows where else than I do for some nutcase with a gun. It's terrible all around, but is a mother's grief in the suburbs worth more than a mother's grief in some village with no running water? I can't imagine the final moments of those little kids, or what their parents are feeling. This has happened in other places too, and I don't have kids, but the proportional outrage involving a crazy guy with a gun compared to the terror that we perpetuate for other kids every day trying to go to school makes my blood boil.

 I ran this by my mom who I disagree with sometimes but who's got a beating heart and a thoughtful soul because I just got blank stares saying this to others, or "well their lives are already hard anyway." It was hard for me to sit in church this weekend (my pastor at the one I go to regularly is Arab so we pray for Palestine and Syria just as much as we pray for our own land) and hear prayers for the families of these children and think about all the other innocent kids (and how angried up does my blood get when even they're regarded as targets?) who die every day thanks to we the people and whose families are constantly troubled by that trauma that continues to repeat itself over and over again to the point where life is impossible to be normal because of the constant zoom of death. Who prays for them here? Even if you see them as your enemy, didn't Jesus tell you to pray for them too?

Maybe it's different for me because in Clevelandia I've met kids who've lost half their cranium to Israeli rockets and have friends who survived civil war in Lebanon and Rwanda who still have flashbacks when they hear fireworks or the airshow and have lost family members to shotguns and machetes. I went to college with a girl who survived Columbine, watched her friends die, but went on to have a beautiful decent life. With our place in the world, it's slightly more possible. It isn't for others.  It hits me in an entirely different place in the gut and it's hard to express that without sounding heartless. I believe that life is sacred and not to be taken lightly, whether that's in the womb or in the next state over or a country across the globe. I don't know what else to say except that I feel so alone in that sentiment.

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.