Tragedy

So much sadness in the news these days, too much tragedy and not enough comedy, too much insanity. Still too much war in the world, too much terrorist activity, too many sad tales of child abuse, too much bullying. Too many shooters in schoolrooms, too many trucks and autos driving full-speed into crowds of people. Too much division . . . too much Trump.

These examples that follow are all taken from the 2013 news, but they could all be duplicated in any year from then to the present. We just don’t seem to run out of tragedy.

When Cory Monteith from Glee died from a drug overdose, either accidental or purposeful, the cast paid tribute to him and I wept along with them as Lea Michele sang “Make You Feel My Love” in memory of his passing, tears simply rolling down her cheeks as she sang, tears rolling down mine as I listened to her.

Then there’s the woman who drowned her three kids and just gave birth to her fourth child in a psychiatric ward. What chance does that poor fourth child have in this world? And why didn’t we as a society require that the woman have her tubes tied? All right, all right, I know we can’t become Big Brother and declare such an edict. But how can we or God allow such tragic insanity to continue?

Adrian Peterson, NFL running back, heard that his two-year-old son had just died from a beating. The boyfriend of Peterson’s ex-girlfriend beat the two-year-old to death. A two-year-old.

A sixteen-year-old in Phoenix recently gave birth to a girl in a public restroom and then threw the baby out the window.

Twenty-seven impoverished migrants, on a boat bound from Africa to Europe, drowned in the Mediterranean.

Joe Bell, father of the Oregon gay teenager who killed himself after being bullied by classmates, was himself killed during his cross-country walk to honor his son, struck by a semi on a Colorado highway.

The list goes on and on, like some kind of bad cosmic joke.

As I approach the end of my life, I realize more and more just how inconsequential all our lives are. It’s not that our lives aren’t worth living. It’s just that the marks we leave behind are so insubstantial, tiny ripples in an eternal sea. We die and the world moves on. I read all the time and I have all these words in my head, other people’s words. I know the lyrics to most of the Great American Songbook and can sing them in my head, word for word, thousands of songs. I’m writing stories and essays and expanding on ideas during most of my waking hours and, I swear, I’m even doing it in my sleep, or that twilight time between waking and sleeping when memory is at its clearest. Why have I spent my whole life stuffing words into my head only to die and have them vanish along with me? All those words seem so unimportant now. I don’t know. But now I think I’m babbling.