It’s cold this morning in the mountains, really cold. While I was preparing to post my blog for the week something was gnawing at me, a sad incident that wouldn’t leave me alone.
Yesterday a local boy was found in the snow after 2 days of searching. The first of these nights
was 17 below zero when he decided to leave a note on facebook, “I love you all.” And walked
out of the house taking a gun.
Suicide leaves us with so many “what ifs”, and a weight of failure and blame on some level, that
is added to the death itself.
There will be no finger pointing; as this incident was too close to the bone for our small town. But, there will be the usual rehashing of the story at the local coffee shops. The talk is a verbal touchstone to feel our family safe. We try to understand this tragedy, and as a parent on some level believe that by verbalizing the story and milling it around our heads as we lay in bed at night, some sense of it will come to us.
There is no good “why” for a child to die; and the fact that he probably took his own life makes no difference. This was his decision on a spiritual level and no one else’s. There should be no guilt or questioning of what we could have done, the fact was he was ready to leave. He completed what he needed to do here, and touched the family and friends he was placed with on this earth.
He was only twenty-one but he loved and was loved.

“And did you get what you wanted from life,
even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved,
To feel myself
Beloved on this earth.”
Raymond Carver poet

losingachildfindingyourself.blogspot.com