May 3, 2009

  • Gone, Forever?

    I suppose it's in the nature of a job like this. Statistically speaking, it's unavoidable, really. Cold math points to the reality that it is bound to happen. But cold math never tells you how to deal with it. It's never fair when the numbers are against you.

    Last night, our school was informed that a former student had a sudden aneurysm. As a few students attempted to rush into DC to see her and her family, she passed away. She was 16.

    It's a weekend and I am bracing myself for the next school day. I don't know how to help being that I'm in denial myself. I'm pressed to speed up my own process of sifting through what's happened so I can be ready for the wave of students that I know is already cresting at my office door.

    No, I am not a guidance counselor. But they treat me like one.

    All I can think about right now is her dimpled smile... her contagious laughter. She was so full of life. Isn't that something we all say about the young who pass away? The truth is, I don't believe that this is something that anyone can really "get over." I remember the people who passed away when I was young. I don't think I ever really "got over" it. In my mind, it is still confusing, dissonant, irrational. How can the living understand death? Do we ever fully "get over" it? Does it ever fully go away, forever?

    Death is unnatural.

    And when a parent outlives her child, it is much more unnatural.

    It is the biggest offense, really: the largest insult to a creation that is molded after an immortal God... and it beats at us, relentlessly, day by day. Irrationally. Unfairly. Interminably. And it changes us forever.

    She'd left the school at some point last year and transferred to another school closer to her home (for various reasons.) Thus, there are some students who don't know her and don't understand what is happening, or have been so distanced from her that this trauma is even more confusing.

    I am thinking of her cousin who was like her shadow and twin.

    I am thinking of the boy who dated her who was going through difficult times as it were.

    I am thinking of the bewildered students who never made it in time.

    I am thinking of God, who in His own grief, is already faced with fingers and turned-away backs, and bitterness, and rage, and accusations. How is it that the Prince of this world who paid the price of His own blood to conquer death lets Himself be accused of this very same crime?

    I don't know. I don't know. I don't know.

    But death has been swallowed up in victory. Swallowed up. In one big, loving gulp.

    Bigger than any playground bully.

    This is for you, D.C. Rest until He comes.