I don’t know what to do.

I wake up with this hole in my heart, in my life – it’s my hole but I know I’m not the only one. My mind grinds on and on demanding answers, demanding a conclusion that satisfies. Getting nothing, it churns and churns like trying to read a broken harddrive.

I go back to work.
I go back to habits.
I sit back into my old life but everything is different. I’ve been wanting it to be different for as long as I can remember. It’s always different, something in me says. It’s this pain, this absence, shattered myth’s of fairy tale lives. Talk about privilege.

But this boy.
But this young man.
This young man and his spirit and his love. This young man and the love he carried and his searching and the love he received that seems to be gone, now, forever. How do the dead receive love? And I’m sure I’m asking all the wrong questions but they’re my questions and I covet them.

The birth of my son was the most impactful day of my life. I try to live in the present and try to make each day the greatest day of my life. I think I do a good job of this but how is it possible to say the day the boy died was the greatest day. If I was given one more day to live or the choice to die now, but the last day would have to be the day the boy died, would I take it?

The question isn’t whether the boy would die. The boy dies, because the boy died. The question is would I take the most tragic day of my life as my last day, if my choice was between one last day and no extra time? Would I take the day my wife died?

I really hate that question right now, I hate it and I’m so angry at its existence. And I understand why a god fearing person would lose faith…I understand it now. This morning I read of another tragedy, two sons, killed by a drunk driver in the prime of their lives, brothers, sons, fathers…on their way to their sisters wedding – killed by someone who was trying to escape from their pain.

And what about the kids dying in war, starvation, depravation – what about all the sons killed before they had their chance. What about the fathers who children are gone from earth when all they thought was they would be gone for an hour.

Am I entitled to have it be different?
All this pain. So much pain and it’s never enough, is it?
The world is like a monster devouring love, devouring hope, devouring innocence.
I hate the world.

I feel so sad.

But…

Quietly, somewhere deep and untouched, I know. I know the hate is not for the world. The hate is for my desparation, my helplessness, the hate is for the pieces of me who don’t want to accept the realities of living in life, this life, this world, this humanity. If I hate it enough, maybe I can hate it to death. And then I’ll be happy, then the boy will be back, the wife will not die, the brothers would not be killed by the drunk driver, the young refugee boy wouldn’t wash up on shore…if I could just hate it enough.

My mind doesn’t feel like it’s been a big help lately but now, I hear it, saying to me as if speaking for the dead, saying, the dead wouldn’t want you to hate. The dead would want you to hug your family. The dead would want you to breathe the air and jump and run and play and laugh and love and be frivolous and carefree and stupid, the dead wouldn’t want you to be in pain any more than what you have. The dead don’t want you to pretend you don’t have pain, that’s not living life fully. The dead want you to live life fully, that’s what my mind says to me and I check it, I check it, is that true I ask, and the answer is an immediate yes. That is what those who are now dead would like for me, for us; to live a full life, no matter how much time we have, no matter how much pain.

My god, I feel so sad.