Matters of death and life

Death.

So final, so divisive and unwielding. What is it in the human animal that makes us look on in morbid curiosity as others suffer. How is it that we can even attempt to capture a glimpse of others pain, and yet, we do. Last night, just behind my house an unhappy woman opened fire on a group of unarmed, unsuspecting ex-coworkers. She killed 6 people before killing herself, five of them were women. Most within my general age demographic. I don't know why that disturbs me more, but it did. People in the midst of their lives, maybe happy, maybe not, perhaps gliding gently through, unknowingly or perhaps in a turbulent torment of self-awareness. What pains me most, I think, about living these moments vicariously, is that I always feel the pain of the survivors, the ones left behind. I don't fear death as much as I fear being left behind, alone. And of course the newspapers don't afford the families an ounce of dignity or privacy. This broke my heart, as it was meant to, "I just want to hug her while she's still warm," he said through sobs. What is that impulse? As if that last moment of human warmth could make up for a lifetime of accumulated wrongs for which we would wish to seek absolution, or a lifetime of foreclosed upon happiness that we would hope to imbibe, if briefly, for one last, fleeting moment.

Flesh slackens. Every day there is a little more death. Coretta Scott King died. I saw that, and her children are undoubtedly crushed and distraught, as I would be if I were to lose my mother, but there is something so much less tragic, and unfairly she will be remembered by most as the wife of a great man, yes, a great woman by her own right, but a survivor nonetheless.

And the moron of a man that calls himself our president declaims in the five seconds of the State of the Union Address to which I am accidentally subjected while passing an open store, "Human life is a sacred gift from our creator and we must not destroy that." (or something to that effect). Hypocritical bastard. Why is the life of a no-nato more important than the thousands of lives we destroy every single day that we are slaughtering civilians and "rebels" alike in Iraq (and elsewhere)? What privileges do our unborn deserve that the unborn of other lands, too foreign and distant to even exist in our imaginary beyond the images of towering dictators and behind the curtains of secrecy and torture, don't? Perhaps the precious life that the gun-toting Texan so vehemently defends, righteous in the eyes of his fabricated god, will serve as fodder one day for the self-same disgruntled masses: hand-gun wielding miserable, outfitted through NRA-sponsored ease with the tool for their very own destruction?

I sit in the darkness for the second time today, tilt my head back, close my eyes. I feel so tired. It is like a wave that settles in without apology. And then she calls in a panic, climbing from the back seat to the front, "Mommy". It is that rise of pitch, terror inspired... she always thinks I have died when I close my eyes and don't answer, for just one second. It might be a tiny little sadistic impulse on my part, or a secret pleasure, like the adolescent fantasy of authoring your own demise only to be a fly on the wall at your funeral, to see how badly everyone felt, but mostly it is a moment robbed for myself, a second to let the sadness sink in, before I have to turn the happy switch back on, to bring in the piñata that she picked for her party. Yes. Life. It has this way of calling us back.