Darkest Before the Dawn

As we approach the darkest time of the year I find myself staying close to the fire, craving the warmth.  The weather is wet and cold and oh, so dark...and sadness in my heart.   The little bodies are being laid to rest in Connecticut, never to grow into adulthood and experience the joys and sorrows of life.   I experienced death very early without even realizing it.  My mother was pregnant along with her friend across the hall on the sixth floor of our apartment building in the big project across the thruway from Wagner College on Staten Island.  My mother and her friend were both going to name their babies Elizabeth, if females were born to them.  Elizabeth was born across the hall and my mother was waiting for me.  One day there were screams coming from the apartment and when my mother ran over she found tiny Elizabeth dead in her crib - sudden infant death syndrome.  I came into this world shortly thereafter and was named Margaret instead.  When I was in sixth grade my best friend, Linda, was playing on a concrete bridge on South Branch Road in Branchburg Township, New Jersey where I grew up.  A friend who was playing in the stream below grabbed a fish from the water and threw it up in the air.  Linda reached for the fish and fell backwards in the path of an oncoming car - on a road that rarely saw more than a dozen cars a day.  I'm not sure I understood death completely, even looking at my friend on the white nylon pillow in her coffin, in a beautiful party dress with a white hairband.  It was so surreal but the picture is seared into my soul.  Her mother's aching grief was more palpable to me than my friend's passing.  They had to move away.  In my mind my friend is still the same girl getting on the bus at her stop on Whiton Road.  It would not be six years later that my next best friend who lived two houses away from me, Hala Lovejoy,  was killed in a car accident.  No viewing was allowed.  For a while I convinced myself she was still alive somewhere, that maybe she faked her own death.  Not two years after that the boy we grew up with, George Young, who lived in the house in between us, was killed in a quick draw gun accident gone wrong.  He was 18 years old.  There are more deaths that will loom large in my collective memory that are still too tender to write about.  One occurred yesterday in my close knit school community when a staff member chose to leave this life by his own hand.  I wonder if people who do this are cognizant of the torturing bewilderment they leave behind them.  Maybe their pain is too severe to consider it.  God blesses us with free will but it is a terrible burden.  Coming on the heels of the school shooting this death is hard to take.  My wonderful librarian friend, Aimee, a pastor herself, led a prayer gathering in a darkened conference room after school today.  She prayed with us and invited us to add our own thoughts.  That few minutes was such a blessing to me.  I felt like a weight had been lifted from my chest, like I had taken a step out of the darkness into the light.  Our God is an Awesome God.    Time to go hug a lamb.