On Two Lives Lost

The words come, or they don’t. Maybe some phrases come, the ones we say when we are confronted with a very particular human moment—a death. Not that we don’t mean what we say. We do.

I do hope family and friends can find comfort in each other’s company—in their arms as needed. In the shared tears that may come. I do hope some peace comes, in time.

A dear friend and colleague of mine last week lost her father who was in his 80s. By all accounts a good man, a good husband, a good father, a good friend. A hard end in the way that a medical diagnosis can be. Tough for those who have a very sharp, deep-in-the-heart sense of seeing a life ebb.

I thought of how his wife, the mother of his children, felt on a first mother’s day without her husband in over 60 years. Take comfort. Find peace.

Today a funeral took place for a former student, killed in an automobile accident far from home—another country, in fact. The girl I knew in high school, bright and fun and funny and curious and sensing a big world out there to be explored, to be grabbed with gusto.

The young woman, now in her late 20s, did wholeheartedly embrace life. Heart and head. A crushing loss to her family. A shock to her friends. Their sense of a life unfinished—a taking away too soon. Too much. Too awful.

Take comfort. Find peace.

I would not presume to take measure of a parent’s pain upon losing a child. There are no words.

We all, it seems to me, take the loss of someone who did not experience what we think of as a full life a little deeper to the bone.

As a teacher of teens over 3 decades for my daily bread, it is not the script as I would have it play out. My students would be out in the world, carving their path—parents themselves, even grandparents at some point. Notice of my passing might come their way as they lived forward into their lives. As it should be.

Maybe the deepest sting is embedded in that expectation of years more to come. Another month. Some hours. A few more breaths.

We are jarred, we are shaken, we are set back. Those of us who go onward may go on less certain--more questions, fewer answers.

But we do not travel alone. In that truth, take comfort. Find peace.