Yesterday, I learned my friend’s 16-year-old daughter lost a childhood friend to gun violence. Her daughter is grief stricken and devasted.
It took only micro moments for me to flash back to my own early experiences with grief.
When I was 16 someone very close to me was brutally murdered on her college campus. A few years later, just days after my 18th birthday, I learned my former boyfriend who’d fallen into a life of drugs, had died by (gun) suicide.
I remember my Mom saying something along the lines of “Wow, the first funeral I ever went to was for an elderly person, I never had to go the to funerals of my friends.”
Mom was right, it WAS hard and shocking. So when I think about my friend’s daughter I wish I could tell her it would be ok (I did) and she would hear that message (I don’t think she did.).
At that age you don’t necessarily have the perspective that older folks who have lived (and lost) have. It can feel like their entire world is desecrated, destroyed. That’s how I felt.
It’s hard to know why some of us have the apparent good fortune of having the first funeral we attend, be to celebrate one’s full life. And how some of us have to come head to head with violence and brutality, as a means of induction into the grieving process.
My heart goes out in prayer hoping that broken hearts left by yesterday’s violent tragedy, young and old, find Peace amidst the rubble of all of the pain such a day leaves behind.
Most critically, I wish for young grievers (like I was) to have hope that the future will be better than what may seem a pointless now. Or at least, I pray there is someone they trust in their life to deliver that message even if it doesn’t resonate right away.