Death, Be Not So Present

Twenty Little Kids and more than a half dozen Women and a killer who, apparently, everyone thought was odd ... all dead. Friday and it's weekend, three of the major Sabbaths, restful days, all disturbed by gunshots and mourning and pain and of course by ...

Details ... all the talking heads voraciously furrowing for details ... pressing at the State Trooper trying to do his job amidst his own feelings ... details will save us from the horror of 6 and 7 year olds dead for no obvious reason. Getting near to the town ... leaving a Teddy Bear ... trying to balance feeling with not feeling.

A Killer ... I don't know what plagued young Lanza ... who knows. The circulated picture? A confused and different boy ... Asperger's? Maybe. But Asperger's doesn't kill. Alienation for years ... maybe the all too often brought up bullying ... Odd kids are bullied incessantly in school. Another Blogger attacks me for being like the others ... blaming Asperger's. No! There was a law passed in maybe 1974 that required that Odd kids be placed in the Least Restrictive Environment that might maintain, presumably, their academic forward-progress. Odd kids in a school full of odd kids doesn't hurt so much. Odd kids in an environment full of aggression towards the different hurts like hell. Take a healthy kid and put them in a totally different environment that's mocking of those differences for 12 years and you may -- at least part of the time -- create a monster ... full of revenge.

Blame ... I blame an old Law. Others blame the illness or the Mother who collected guns. Some blame the Laws. The Republicans and the NRA! The Democrats and their Godlessness. Huckabee says the schools are Godless and murder is the obvious outcome. I wrote on one listserv that I had considered during a morning fearful reverie that our civilization with it's 20,000,000 people cities and hostile rhetoric and inabilities to embrace difference had reached a tipping point.

Inability to Feel ... The listservs I've been part of are drenched in hostilities. Fights breaking out between professionals who as a widow of one of the great analysts, Sperge English, once opined: "should have known better." Fight! Don't embrace difference. And, damn! Don't feel.

Answers ... We wait on answers that will give us that long-overdue but heralded SENSE OF CLOSURE. There is no closure to mourning. Like any other wave, its destruction depends on its amplitude (its height) and its frequency (the time-distance between crests, for instance). Mourning eases and never ends. Those of us Playing in the Last Quarter, charter members of the Club of Orphans, know well that mourning has no closure.

In my tradition, upon hearing of a near one's death, we rip our clothing in rageful anger, eschew speech and pleasures, and say Blessed is the Truthful Judge. The usual is discontinued until it is possible, once again.