Today is my birthday. I am 63 years old. As this realization hit me, I wondered, as I’m sure we all do, “how did THAT happen?” I longed to be just a little bit younger. As I was mourning my aging process, I was also reading today’s Washington Post. The article is about the Newtown, Conn., shootings. You can read it here: http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/after-newtown-shooting-mourning-parents-enter-into-the-lonely-quiet/2013/06/08/0235a882-cd32-11e2-9f1a-1a7cdee20287_story.html?hpid=z3
The reporter, Eli Saslow, basically takes you through a few days in the life of one set of parents who lost their seven-year-old son, Daniel, to that senseless act of violence seven months ago. It is a heart-wrenching story, and, at times, tear-producing. It’s not often a news story makes me cry. This one did.
How can you not lose it when you read about young parents losing young children who simply went to school that day? Those parents are frozen in time. They can’t move, yet, beyond the tremendous loss they have suffered; the tremendous loss of young, innocent lives that did no wrong.
The fear those children must have felt; the lack of understanding of what or at least why this was happening to them. We all feel that feeling, why did this happen. We’ll likely never know.
Those parents are fighting for gun control, at least a realistic form of gun control that, if they achieve it, will give them at least a moment’s satisfaction that they did something positive with their grief. Maybe in that moment of satisfaction, they won’t grieve as painfully the loss of their children, before that sense of deep loss returns.
Today, for me, reading that story made me glad that I’m 63 years old. Far worse things have happened to other people.
The reporter, Eli Saslow, basically takes you through a few days in the life of one set of parents who lost their seven-year-old son, Daniel, to that senseless act of violence seven months ago. It is a heart-wrenching story, and, at times, tear-producing. It’s not often a news story makes me cry. This one did.
How can you not lose it when you read about young parents losing young children who simply went to school that day? Those parents are frozen in time. They can’t move, yet, beyond the tremendous loss they have suffered; the tremendous loss of young, innocent lives that did no wrong.
The fear those children must have felt; the lack of understanding of what or at least why this was happening to them. We all feel that feeling, why did this happen. We’ll likely never know.
Those parents are fighting for gun control, at least a realistic form of gun control that, if they achieve it, will give them at least a moment’s satisfaction that they did something positive with their grief. Maybe in that moment of satisfaction, they won’t grieve as painfully the loss of their children, before that sense of deep loss returns.
Today, for me, reading that story made me glad that I’m 63 years old. Far worse things have happened to other people.
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