Reflections on 28 Deaths

Twenty children, six adults, one mother and one son. Dead in Connecticut.

My heart is heavy. Twenty-eight deaths by gunshot in one day. We spasm through a communal grief, fear for the safety of every child, desire to have a giant rubber eraser for time. Can't we erase back to a point where other choices could be made? How far back would we have to go?

We don't see the dozens of other deaths by gunshot that occur each day singly and in isolation. Twenty-eight deaths by gun happen every day in America. It's quite common. We are not outraged. We do not spasm. It is not news. The grief, though, the grief flows out in waves of pain from pierced bodies.

I've had my griefs, my losses. Enough to know that grief does not kill you and it does not particularly make you stronger, but it does alter you. If you're lucky, it stretches the heart unbearably till it can hold the love that you can no longer physically express. And you end up with a more expansive understanding for those who suffer (including yourself). If you're not lucky, grief can seize up your emotional innards like hard water choking off the openings in a shower head. I've had it happen both ways. It hurts both ways.

I am not in shock from the shootings in Connecticut. I am horrified, but not surprised by this lone gunman with his weapons of mass destruction. His life was a surfeit of guns. When you go crazy, you grab what's handy. It might be a credit card. It might be a knife. It might be language. If you are surrounded by guns, you grab guns. It's no surprise. I don't know why death comes as such a surprise. It is our one truly universal experience. Maybe if we acknowledged this truth more we would kill less. It's a paradox.

I am calm about my own death. I know I will go into the ground and eventually rejoin the processes of my planet--erosion, remodeling, creation, destruction. I know that any impact I have must be in the here and now. I can't waste my time. I have come out of the earth, my body made of water, carbon, calcium, iron, and many other earth elements. It makes sense that as I rise up as an entity I then subside back into the arms of the mother planet. I am comforted.

Although I have just posited a soul-less death, I feel like our national obsession with guns is an illness of the soul, the sacred psyche. These young men who kill so spectacularly are so desirous of acknowledgement of some kind, desirous of comfort, of meaning. My heart goes out to them as much as to grieving loved ones of the dead. Many of us have felt the way those young men feel, but we either (1) did not have access to a huge amount of ammunition and ready guns or (2) had resources, had relationships, and, in my case, had a few treasured gifts like the ability to express in words and an indomitable sense of humor. We are them. They are us.

The song that keeps repeating in my mind is "Where Have All the Flowers Gone." It's meant to mourn the loss of young men in war but seems entirely apt to describe the loss of children in an armed nation. Where have all the flowers gone, long time passing? Where have all the flowers gone, long time ago? Where have all the flowers gone? Gone to graveyards, every one. When will we ever learn? When will we ever learn?"