No Title for This One

This morning when I woke up -- and, yes, I often wake up thinking about a topic for my blog -- I thought of a funny idea to write about. I was developing my thought as I made my coffee and took my little dog outside. But then I opened my email, and front and center was a note from a friend telling me that a mutual friend's daughter had died yesterday. It's so tragic. She (the daughter) had a rare type of cancer that had been in remission for a year or so, but apparently she contracted some sort of lung infection and her body wasn't strong enough to fight it off. She was in her early thirties.

I want to be clear that I'm not trying to appropriate anyone else's tragedy. I hadn't talked with this particular friend (the mother) in many years although we were very good friends in high school and beyond. (The other one, who sent me the email, I've stayed in closer contact with.) But who can hear something like this and not be affected by it? I'm sure I said this before, in the context of the death of another friend's child, but the emotions that come to those of us (I assume I'm not alone in this, or maybe I am and I'm just very selfish) who hear something like this are confusing. While I'm sad for my friend and her family -- and especially for so much unlived life of her daughter (not quite sure how to phrase that) -- at the same time I feel relief that it was not my child and guilt for feeling that way.

Ideally, it wouldn't happen to any of us. We all know it can, the terrible loss of a child of any age. A while back, someone told me of a conversation in which a person said to a mother who had recently lost her child, "I can't imagine how you feel." The mother's reply was something along the lines of (if I'm getting the story straight), "Of course you can imagine it." There was more to it than that, which I can't remember, but the point is that we can imagine it; we just don't want to. In fact, I think if our minds ever happen to wander in the direction that it might happen to us, we divert ourselves away from those thoughts in whatever way we can. And toward that end, I will just say that I sent my friend a note of condolence; I don't want to think about this anymore. There's nothing else I can do, and it's all overwhelmingly sad.