Suburban Terror

Last Words Last Forever

 

On Thursday of last week we received an email from a dear friend in Northern Virginia. She and her family live less than twenty miles from the scenes of the first "sniper" attacks. Her email contained a plaintive lament. We reprint it here, with her permission:

In addition to the "sniper," the school sent home a note saying that there were two attempted abductions in the area of my son’s school. A 13 and 18 year old were approached by the same guy 10 days apart."

I feel fragile and at my breaking point.  I want to go away, but where do I go?  Is this normal?  Are we programmed to deal with this sort of stuff?  It's just so...unnatural.

I shared with some neighbors my intense feelings and they were visibly uncomfortable with me.  No one knows how to deal with me or what to say to me.

                    Make sense of all this please.

The ongoing attacks have nearly paralyzed several communities in an ever-widening radius. For most parents, the biggest fear is of something happening to their children, and them not being there to stop it. Here is a mom, legitimately terrified on behalf of her children, feeling powerless in the situation, and then feeling unheard and dismissed when she told the truth.

Her feelings are accurate and normal, yet when she first voiced them to others in her community, she was pooh-poohed. Now that we are nearly a week days into this ongoing assault on personal safety, they may have changed their tune.

She wanted to go away and hide, or have someone else deal with it for her. She didn’t so much like having to be the adult. Having a sniper roaming your neighborhood is unnatural, and there’s precious little any of us could do to be prepared for something so illogical.

It is exactly like any other terrorist attack. It comes when least expected, and makes no sense. We are held hostage to the randomness of it all. Our minds can easily imagine our loved ones or ourselves in harm’s way.

At The Grief Recovery Institute, a majority of our calls come from people whose lives have been torn apart by senseless accidents, drive-by shootings, sudden heart attacks, or suicides - constant reminders of how fleeting life can be.

There is a common lament in the thousands of conversations we’ve had with people who have lost a loved one to a sudden, unexpected incident. "If only I had known it was the last time I would see them alive, I would change the last thing I said to them."

We’ve never met anyone who has a guarantee that they will be alive beyond the moment they are in. The same is obviously true for the people we love. So, we are well-advised to say exactly those most important things, to the people who are most important to us - each and every time we have the opportunity.

If you recall the recordings we heard of people on those ill-fated flights on 9/11, they all said as much as they could about love and relationships as would fit into the time they had. They did not waste time on extraneous stuff. We can learn from that.

At the very least, make sure that the last thing you say to the people you love, is something that you could live with forever.

.