Every second of every day someone is born and someone dies. Every so often you read the exact numbers, but that’s more or less the case.

In the kitchen, I pour my morning coffee as the television newscaster delivers the daily tally. A teenager is shot, an apartment fire kills three, a fatal car accident, another military casualty. Later, in the car, an NPR story drifts into my consciousness from the car radio. It’s punctuated with audio of Middle eastern mothers shrieking over the murder of their children. Every day, in numerous formats, we are assaulted with reminders of death and the pain it inflicts. I had become desensitized to it.

Suddenly with a new perspective, I intimately relate to those numbers, those statistics, those shrieks. Each of those deaths is a son, a brother, a loved one. Lives will be rocked. Parents and siblings and children will be tossed into the whirling disbelief that I am in. Flung into an emotional funnel cloud. Spinning, feelings out of control. Mental function on pause.

I’m driving. I’m lost in thought about John’s death. I am in a sea of cars in a tangle of freeways in a huge metropolitan area. All those people in all those cars. Driving beside me, behind me, ahead of me…who of them is suffering the loss of a loved one?
Who in these cars driving by me is distracted by their thoughts, feeling like I am?

One world, a giant organism, sloughing off cells and generating new ones. Death is a part of life. None of us is immune.

With a world of people suffering loss every day, why does it feel so out-of-the-ordinary? If death is part of life’s experience, why am I so ill equipped to deal with it?