Saturday, December 15, 2012

The Unfathomable

I didn't want to write about this. I didn't think that I could.

But now, as I sit alone in the chill dark of early morning, having given up on recapturing whatever dream I was having when anxiety finally woke me, it's all that I can think about doing.

I'm just trying to process, though the thoughts and feelings I'm having can only be processed so deeply. I'm so far removed, and so deeply entrenched, at the same time. I can't possibly fathom the pain. I don't want to. But my mind goes there anyway, to waters unknown and of impossible depth, and I fear to drown in them.

I'm suddenly recalling the last Christmas of my senior year in college, when I was reduced to trembling tears during midnight Mass as it suddenly struck me that the family of a classmate of mine would be experiencing their first Christmas without her. Just a week or so before the break, she had died in a tragic accident- on an evening stroll with her boyfriend and another friend across a railway trellis, she had been the victim of tragic timing- a train approached before they all could cross.

I never knew her. Never even knew of her, or what she looked like. But the loss of her was palpable. It could be read on the faces of the students I passed. It could be felt in the quiet of the dormitories. As a campus, and as individuals, we mourned. As for me, I felt sadness, and sorrow, but through a strange filter of numbness.
Then Christmas came, and the pain of it took my breath away. But it was someone else's pain. I could only sense it in the abstract, and still it shook me to my core.

How much more destructive might it be were it my own.

I can't imagine. I don't want to.

And here I am again, just before Christmas, attempting to work through a pain that doesn't truly belong to me- trying to take it in, trying to push it out, not really being in control of what I'm feeling either way.

I cry tears, I feel rage, I fear for my children. I pray for those who have had loved ones- so suddenly, so unfairly- ripped away.

I cannot fathom their pain.

I don't want to.

But still, I mourn.

May God bring comfort to all those who are suffering in the wake of the Newtown, Connecticut tragedy. My heart is with them, even if it knows not what to feel.