I don’t think that I will ever forget the morning when I awoke to the news that an educational colleague of mine had lost his son in a road rage murder. The story was devastating and I would follow his plaintive posts on Facebook from that moment to this very day. 

I too had suffered a tragic loss when my thirty three year old father died suddenly from a car accident. The horror and pain of that moment is buried deep inside my soul so I felt that I understood the anguish that my friend was feeling. Still, his was the loss of a child whose life should have stretched out before him. It was difficult to comprehend how a parent would be able to come back from such an horrific tragedy. I would read his honest and heartbreaking commentaries in the days and weeks after the death of his son when his feelings were raw and filled with both grief and anger. I would learn from him. He is after all an educator who wanted us all to know how to how to speak about such an unspeakable act with grace and understanding. 

I am a religious person who had a habit of attempting to make sense of seemingly inexplicable loss with platitudes. I had all too often attributed some meaning to the loss of a loved one by suggesting that God takes people from us for various reasons meant to help us grow as people or even to honor the one who has died with a heavenly eternity. It never occurred to me how hurtful such comments might be to a father who had lost his teenage son in the flower of his life. My friend bravely explained why attributing death to some spiritual system of rewards and punishments was cruel. 

The bereaved father convinced me that insinuating that God was choosing one person over another to prove some point was insulting to both God and the persons who had lost a loved one. He went further to say that suggesting that God had blessed some of us in times of destruction but ignored or hurt others in the same situation was hurtful. Thus I began to measure my own responses to the tragic losses of people that I know with a new caution for their feelings. 

Only recently I heard an old man smile and claim that he must be one of God’s chosen people because he was stilling living when all of his peers had died. Because he was a rational man I told him what my friend had taught me and the old man nodded and admitted that maybe he was no more deserving of a perk from God than the innocent young boy who was gunned down by anger and evilness. 

I thought my my sixteen year old cousin who had charmed us with her gentleness, beauty and brilliance at a Christmas gathering long ago. Only weeks later she had died from a brain tumor that had never shown its presence in her body. I will cannot forget her funeral because she was the same age as my youngest brother. I loved her and could not imagine the painful grief of her mother, my aunt, who threw herself on her daughter’s casket in a state of hysteria. I cried uncontrollably over her loss and to this very day. I think of how my cousin would be seventy years old today if she had lived. I feel a deep sense of sorrow that she but never reached adulthood. I sometimes wonder what her life might have been. I find myself understanding the feelings of my friend who lost his son. I now measure my words when speaking to anyone who has endured the death of a loved one. I tell myself to stop talking and just start listening to how the person is feeling.

My friend has indeed used his sorrow and anger to become an advocate for people who endure the violence of criminals. His talents as an historian and educator have made him a spokesperson for victims. He now fights for laws that keep dangerous people off of our streets and in the prisons where they belong. He has focused on positive ways of dealing with the death of his son but neither he nor I believe that his story is simply the result of some vast eternal plan. 

None of us know when our lives will end. To believe that living a long life is a sign that we are somehow more worthy than others sounds ridiculous when we set it next to the reality of children dying or even young men like my father never getting the opportunity to see his children become adults. Each of us is a treasure to someone and our deaths leave those who love us bereft no matter how young or old we may be. 

I still struggle to know what to say or how to act with someone who has experienced a loss. I try to measure my words and mostly just allow that person to be however they wish to be in that moment. I simply want them to know that I love them and and that I will be available for them if they need me. I have learned to acknowledge their feelings without attempting to gloss them over with words that will not help. My friend has taught me that.