This Might Be the Last I Speak of This... Or Maybe Not

This whole tragedy has made me think a lot about grief. I have read some pretty powerful blog posts, some of which were pretty raw. And all of the ones I have read that have touched me so deeply have been posts by people who did not have any sort of personal connection to Connecticut, but are just mamas who are fixing hair in the mornings and playing trucks in the afternoons and waiting up late in the night, wondering what on earth they would do with all the extra time and the empty house and the broken heart and the pieces of a full life...

Our kids' Christmas program was yesterday morning at church. I did okay during praise and worship until the associate pastor mentioned "Christmas presents that won't ever be opened". Then I lost it a little. The worst, though, was when the back doors opened and the kids came flooding down the aisles. I sat there, in that moment and in many other moments throughout the (funny) program, with tears streaming down my face because there are twenty sets of parents who probably haven't yet thought ahead to the fact that they will never watch their kid in a program again because right now the pain is just too primal to even think of programs.

And I wondered if sharing the pain across the nation diminishes it at all... if the fact that mommies are blogging and crying and praying and mourning withe those Connecticut moms makes it any easier to bear...? The moment I heard about the tragedy on Friday, my thoughts rushed to two moms I know who have lost children to accidents. I don't know why I thought of them, other than because on Friday, twenty more moms joined that awful sorority that no one asks to be part of and everyone wishes their membership could be revoked. But in thinking of them, I wondered if grief is easier to bear when the load is shared... if losing a child in a mass tragedy and sharing the pain diminishes it at all? If knowing that the world is grieving with you makes your grief easier to handle or if it somehow compounds it? I don't know, and there is only one way TO know and I pray to God that I never have that reason to know....