I can’t write about anything else until I write about something that I don’t think is mine to write about.  It is someone else’s story, many others’ stories, actually, and yet it has found an uncomfortable home inside of my thoughts and it will reside there, clogging up every other feeling until I let it go into the world of letters, which will possibly make it into words, which hopefully will string into a sentence, which will maybe make some sort of semblance of explanation.

I imagine death as a line between here and there.  “There” may be something to some, and to others it is nothing.  To me, it is hope, but yet so much fear wrapped into it, that the hope for me is still clouded in walls of doubt, from time to time.  The line then, as I mentioned, is death.

Usually, on a normal day, the line is wide: the thickness of, well forever, but then, you get the phone call, or read the story, or open the door, and the line is barely a line.  Someone has grabbed you by the back of your shirt and shoved you against the thin sheet of glass, so fragile, you know at any moment it will break and you will fall through to there, or worse, someone you love will and you will be left staring through the glass.

It’s impossible to be here, because now you know the truth that you were never protected by any barrier.

From here to there requires no effort, no reason, and no amount of worrying or protection could stop it. 

This is all bad, and this is all difficult, but this is unfathomable until the force carrying you to this uncomfortable viewpoint is the death of someone so innocent that it almost makes here an impossibility.  Why am I here, when he is there?

No, even worse.  It makes your hope in “there” turn into frustration.  Why there?  Why them?  Why him? Why her?

In the middle of your questions, you want to feel an answer, but the only answers given are with such arrogance and absolution that they blur the questions even further.  Trying to find peace and accept your faith in the middle of all of this can be a difficult thing to do.  Letting yourself slip into the black hole of worry and doubt is much easier.  Just let me wallow.  Just let me let it all go, but I never can

So here is my resolve, if you can even call it that.

I resolve that I don’t know. 

I resolve that I hope I know and I have faith that I will grow to have more faith, but if I could be completely real and raw with how I feel, it is that those that believe have crushed my belief with hate and lack of regard.

I’m talking way broader than death here.  I am talking about all of it.  The walking, talking, breathing, loving, sort of things.

And this is where I spiral, back into belief, not because someone told me “there is a reason for everything”, because I believe that is a Grade A lie.

I believe, because I have hope, because I have love, because I search for depth.

If anyone has ever seen anything beautiful, and I mean something truly beautiful: the achy, full, breathless sort of beautiful, where there just has to be something to here and to there…you know?

Could it all be so mundane and purposeless?

I don’t believe every move is ordained, and I don’t think it’s all chaos either.

I think it’s a string of chaos and purpose, all tangled up and we can choose to simplify it and say that it all will always make sense (or it will makes sense “one day”) or go the other route and say that none of it makes sense and everything we do exists for naught, but I think the answer lies in the beauty of the confusion.

Beauty, to me, is reason in imperfection. 

It is finding truth in the chaos.  It is accepting that there is more, but it’s up to us.  We can’t ignore the promise and we can’t deny the purpose, but just as much, we can’t deny the lack of it sometimes.

Does this make any sense?

I’m not even sure myself, but it’s where I’m at.  I ache every day for what has been lost to so many.  There is so much purposeless loss.

I hate it and I hate that there is no justice in it, at least for now.  I wish I could give it all back to all of them.

I’m left with this thought, though, if I truly believe that beauty can be found in the purposelessness and the chaos, then every move forward and every smile amidst the enormity of pain is impossibly beautiful.

Grief is something we have to do and emptiness is something we will feel, but we can throw a giant middle finger up to death every time we take that next step and hope in something greater.

“Because God’s children are human beings, made of flesh and blood, the Son also became flesh and blood. For only as a human being could he die, and only by dying could he break the power of the devil, who had the power of death.  Only in this way could he set free all who have lived their lives as slaves to the fear of dying”