Too Soon

Well wow I've had a bad couple of days. Or more accurately, there has BEEN a lot of bad the last couple of days. Yesterday I found out that a guy I went to church with in high school and with whom my younger sister was pretty good friends died in a car accident, probably due to drunk driving, though the details aren't clear yet. He was twenty five years old, but all I can conjure up in my mind are pictures of a blond, smiling kid about fifteen years old, cracking jokes while we road the bus downtown each Sunday to pick up kids for church. He was such a sweetheart, and now he's just gone. Not here.

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This afternoon, Jim learned that one of the girls from the soccer team he coached a few years ago was found dead yesterday, under suspicious circumstances. She was nineteen years old. And now she's gone. Not here.

Sometimes I feel like by having children I have basically bought myself a ticket to inevitable heartbreak at some point. Stuff like this makes me want to bubble wrap my kids and lock them in the house for the rest of their lives. I am so sad that these young lives are over, but the ones I am really torn up for are their families, for their parents. For their mothers, the women who still remember what it felt like to have those babies kick and jump inside them and who are now living out their worst nightmare: burying the child that they once delivered and cradled in their arms. God. I just can't imagine. How do you keep living when your heart is in shreds like that? I know you do, but just... how?

Really puts everything I was planning to post about- scratches on the wall, marker on the carpet, poop in the big-boy underwear- all into perspective. They can tear my house apart and I swear I'll watch it with a smile if they could just promise me to stay alive forever and always.