Painful Losses

Within four weeks  time our area suffered the terrible losses of four beautiful young people to car accidents. In one instance a brother and sister died together, their parents’ only children, and in another, a young couple in love.  No alcohol or improper driving was involved in either case. Just accidents; things went wrong, and heart break happened. The great sweeping net of chance fell upon them, and suddenly they were gone.

 The communities have lost some of their best and brightest girls and boys. A  wonderful piece of the future is now missing. Parents, friends, and relatives are making their way through the  fog of pain and finality that comes with death. Words escape us in expressing the sorrow felt for the families. There is no poetic phrase, no eloquent quote of wisdom, that can fully dissipate the grief of a loss so devastating.

Men and women that have lost a spouse are referred to as widowers and widows. Children who lose their parents are called orphans. It has been said though, that in all the worlds’ many and varied forms of communication, there is no name for a parent who has lost a child. Perhaps the depth of despair, the agony of the emptiness, the rending of the soul, is just too much to put into words… in any language.

Sadly, the story of the loss of a child is told over and again during war time. I remember a day when I saw an olive drab Army vehicle pull into the drive of our neighbors across the road. It was during the Vietnam War, and those folks had a son, a friend  a little older than me, in-country with the infantry. As a teenager that was coming up for the draft, I feared what this Army Chaplain visit might mean. We soon learned that those folks had lost their son, as did tens of thousands of other parents during that Asian war.

  When a son or daughter goes in harms way in the service of their country, the potential for loss is agonized over until their safe return. Some parents  have lost every one of their children to the battlefield. The loss of a child in  sudden unexpected and/or unexplained circumstances, however, seems to add one more element of despair. The loss isn’t less because it is expected or feared, but being blindsided by fate only adds to -and perhaps intensifies- the pain.

Some have said that you never fully get past the pain; you have to work through the pain. I am reminded of a line from the movie Lonesome Dove. In one scene, the sudden death of a cowboy, at the beginning of the cattle drive to Montana, has the rest of the hands saddened and unnerved. A brief graveside eulogy by Gus McCrae ends with “ …now lets us go on to Montana”; to which Woodrow Call adds, “He’s right boys, the best thing to do with death is to ride off from it”. Time and distance seems to help us cope with the pain and eventually place other things to the forefront of our minds. The memory of the loss is ever sharp, however, just below the surface, and pains us anew when brought to mind again.

John Steinbeck wrote:  “It's so much darker when a light goes out than it would have been if it had never shone.” In the  first darkness of loss, one might feel that it would have been better to never have been exposed to the light at all, than to have it, love it, and lose it. But, for me, if I were to go blind, I believe I would be grateful for having seen all that I my eyes had seen in the past. The memories of sunlit days and starry nights, I think, would bring me joy even though the loss of that sense would  greatly sadden me. The smell, the sound, the feel, of precious things are intimate to us years past their happening. Memories are a record of our daily living, in the albums of our lives.

Death reminds us that nothing in this life lasts forever. It helps us to become more conscious of our mortality, and reminds us to glean the best from every day, every time we can. My wish for the families of these precious children lost is that they somehow learn how to press on. I hope that cherished memories can salve the wounds, and that friends and family will be able to shore them up until they find the strength to stand, and then move forward again. Broken things will mend with time, and if things are not just as they were before, we learn how to go on living...  only differently.

Life will never be the same for these families who have suffered such painful losses. Perhaps a small bit of comfort can come to them from the knowledge that there are those of us who care. We care how they feel. Although we may not know them personally, we feel we know them as part of a circle of parenthood. All of us who are mothers and fathers feel so saddened by the loss of any child; because we can only imagine how we ourselves would suffer, should it be our own.

Our wish for these families is that with each passing day the pain grows softer, the day is a bit brighter, and  that feeble feet and wounded hearts find the strength to move one step further in the path to healing. May God bless them all.