When Tragedy Strikes Strangers

You read it every day---"teen killed in drive-by shooting", "tornado in Georgia---8 Dead", "50,000 Die in Chinese Earthquake", "140,000 Cyclone Victims Perish In Myanamar". The frequency of such tragic news has a way of numbing my soul, coating your feelings with teflon. But the collective weight of so much death eventually drags one down. And the knowledge that the victims are all innocent, that it could be you, can prod you to a state of heightened empathy. Still, there is a strange comfort that arises from the thought that such deaths are, in a perverse, disconnected way, anonymous. And the less you are connected to such deaths, the more abstract they seem.

Such is the odd and unsatisfying knowledge that although death visited itself upon thousands, at least you didn't know them. Not personally anyway. And not their friends or family, hopefully.

A few evenings back, I heard there was a terrible accident justs two blocks from where I work. The following morning, newspaper reports told the story of the accident---a motorist collided with a bicyclist and the bicyclist, a 27 year old man, died. Having lost a friend in a bicycling fatality two years ago, I found myself feeling one thing: please let this person be a complete stranger. The newspaper didn't identify him pending notification of his family.

The following morning his identity was revealed with harsh impact. We didn't know him but we know his parents who we recently befriended. They live in our neighborhood. We have many friends in common. Our children attended the same schools. It turns out his parents were traveling in Italy when they got the call that is every parents' worst nightmare. His mother is a gifted musician who founded an all-woman steel drum band, the kind that cranks out happy music that can keep you dancing for hours.

My feelings of sorrow and loss for our friends cannot be captured in words. Such feelings were once abstract in my life, but with the unexpected loss of my brother several years ago, I discovered a new kind of grief. I feel that kind of grief for our friends now.