Over the last month I have been witness to great pain. Young people dying by suicide and illness. The people that love them crushed by grief. People struggling under circumstances beyond what any soul should have to endure. Pain and sorrow that isn’t mine alone, but like air and light and wind, crawls over me when I’m still. Pain that leaves its host and seeps into us, moving without respect for boundaries, oblivious to conventions. I am honoured and touched when people reach out to me because they have read something from me or about me, or something I’ve written about our daughter’s death. It’s meaningful for me to be able to speak to people, even in some small capacity, at a time when they feel alone and anguished. And at the same time, it can leave me feeling futile and ineffectual in a moment where all I want to do is take away what isn’t mine to take. Words fall flat where a touch and a hug and a sincere listening ear are needed. Even those, really, aren’t enough.
But it’s been in this time that I’m living that someone else I know, a spirited young mother with three young children, had a terrifying scare of her own. Her infant