innocence escapes me
New to this place, scared and prohibited by my own lack of understanding of this world and its dangers, I had total reliance on my parents for any sense of direction. As time went by, minor accomplishments (in retrospect I realize by no real efforts of my own, but what I know now was really just blind luck) bolstered my confidence that I was figuring it all out. My misguided belief in my own ability to fend for myself and the realization that gave me a false sense of understanding of life kept me delightfully clueless. Particularly in my teens. I really did think I knew it all.
As I grew older, into my early twenties I somehow held onto this innocence and naivety. I built this wall between what the world endures, and what I felt was within the realm of possibility for my situation. Even when I lost one of my best friends to a drug related robbery at age 20, I still felt as if I was somehow immune to the cruel reality that bad things happen to good people.
Even into my mid to late twenties when I got married, I was able to pull my bride into my buffer zone. Even as the world was forever changed on the third day of our honeymoon when so many died at the hands of those who would give their lives to take the lives of those they considered infidels. To me, this still seemed like something that happened to that other guy. Almost like a TV show that I would immerse myself in, but that I could turn off at any time.
Then one day I became a parent. Suddenly my own condition is shared with another person who relies on me for this total sense of direction. I worried about things that I never had to worry about. I feared things that I use to write off as someone else’s problem. And after a lengthy stay in a children’s hospital, suddenly sand began to run out of the hourglass that held my innocence.
As I’m coming up on my mid thirties, over the last ten years I’ve become so much more hypersensitive to the world around me like I never had been. My eyes open every day to more and more of the world I live in. Fears, anxiety, and paranoia widen the mouth of that hourglass. Events that I used to disassociate myself from, penetrate me now like a knife cutting at my very soul.
Nothing affects me more than the untimely death of what I guess I can now call “kids”. But the older I get the more I realize that’s what we all are.
The tragic deaths of Channon and Chris affected me more than any other event had up to that point in my life. Suddenly, I saw that by no fault of our own, this light that we call life can be extinguished in an instant.
Now, the recent loss of Henry, the son of one of my former co-workers cut me to the bone. I feel so very helpless. For yet another time, the mouth of that hourglass has opened up a little further and my innocence continues to spill out like a glass of water onto the floor.
I wish I could do something to help Katie, Chris, Henry’s siblings, and all other family and friends affected by this senseless tragedy. But only time can ease their suffering, and once the sand has fallen, there’s no putting it back.
God speed Henry.
