The Sorrow of Horror Stories

Feeling barraged by all this bad news.  One horror story after another.  Devastating.  Penetrating.   Consuming.  Engulfing.  Pick the word – it’s all too much at the same time.

Seven kids in one family dying in a house fire; a plane purposefully set into a downward spiral, crashing into jagged mountains, killing everyone onboard;  fire explosion in Manhattan and discovery of bodies under the rubble; a distant family relation dies suddenly on the tennis court of a heart attack at age 37.

All so sudden.  Life extinguished .  People eating, sleeping, playing, traveling – and then gone!

It’s hard to take in all this bad stuff.   And this is all on the heels of my own mother’s death.  Yes, she had a ‘good’ death, not like these tragic stories.  But still… endings and sadness are heavy.  The weight constricts your chest.

When you keep on hearing one story after another, it’s boom, boom, boom, another slam and pounding into the heart of pain.  Strangers, but yet people.  All of us.  And we realize our vulnerability.  There but by the grace of G-d go I.

The horrors of life are horrendous.

I’m not up to saying what we do with all this.  I’m simply up to feeling it, breathing into it and trying to bear witness to the reality of it all, of this life:  its awesomeness- yes,  its  unpredictability, its horrendousness;  the fact that it and we hang by a string, and that we all live moment to moment.

We all have shock absorbers.  But when we keep being pounded by bad news, I’m not sure how much we can truly absorb.  It becomes too much for the system and we go into some other sort of state.  Not sure what that is; I’m feeling in a trance-like, robotic-like, almost non-feeling-like state.

I don’t listen to music (Jewish mourning period for a parent who dies) and  I ‘can’t’ keep listening to talk show radio and news that continuously reveals more and more of the gruesome details of the awful tragedies that seem to be happening at a continuous pace.  It’s like, what’s next?!

And now as I write this I get a message on my phone that my mother’s aide’s father just passed.  At least Clara was there with him.  So much loss for this woman.  She was at my mother’s death bed as she took her last breaths, after caring for her for 10  years.  Then she went back home to be with her dad who wasn’t doing well.  I guess he too waited for her to come home so that he could pass on with her by his side.   There is something big to be said for Timing.  But still…

Too much loss can seem to be way too much to bear.  And it is, for a while.  We need to bend to the heaviness of sorrow.   With time, patience, nurturance, support, the light will re-enter and help us regain our footing.  But not just yet.  For now I’m feeling very off kilter.

How about you?