Summary: There's never a right response to tragedy. For me, it's always been disbelief followed by my need to help and be useful. In natural disasters like wildfire, Katrina, and Sandy, it's easy enough to donate clothes and blood, but what do we do when there's been a massacre? I've lived relatively close to the World Trade towers when they were bombed and, years later, the Aurora killings when they happened. If you've ever lived in the vicinity of tragedy like that, or on the fringe of any kind of violence, then you know how it tears at your sense of security and the idea that horrors on such a scale could ever happen in your back yard, so very close to home. I went numb when I first heard about Connecticut. Here in Colorado we'd only just emerged from the Aurora shootings, the grisly murder of a woman in Broomfield, and the savage rape, abduction and killing of a little girl in Westminster. Not all of those tragedies made national news, but the toll was heavy here at home, in Newtown and beyond, and the sum of it was just too much. As the stories unfolded and the death toll rose, it exposed the broken parts I think we've been sweeping aside for too long. We are all in some degree of pain, no matter what we've been telling ourselves. After days of increasingly bad news nothing seemed to matter. Not the work I did, not the dreams I had, not the love I wanted to give and get—nothing. Beyond my disbelief, anger and frustration in the past few weeks I landed in a kind of void that surprisingly seems to be helping me get my bearings again. Slowly. For addicts, it's akin to hitting bottom, and—to the extent I'd been operating within a false sense of security in the life I'd created for myself—I'd say I was an addict too, hooked on an illusion of how things should be in the world. So, like anybody dependent on ideas that are supposed to define a life, coming out of my self-imposed daze is taking lots of effort, relapsing, and conscious recommitment to showing up differently each day. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross was a psychiatrist famous for her work of breaking down the grieving process into five stages. There's denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and, finally, acceptance. But she didn't live to see the Aurora movie theater, the Oregon mall, the Connecticut school, or the likes of Trayvon Martin and more—all still very much present in our consciousness, and each a cause for tremendous grief. I wonder what she would have said about killings closer to home—my home—within the last six months: the little girl abducted and brutalized by a wayward teenage boy; the innocent woman gunned down at the auto shop by an enraged ex; the crazed man fresh from jail who murdered his girlfriend, her sister and brother-in-law before turning the gun on himself in what would be his final, lingering act of violence. I would have liked to ask that expert: If we're in this together, then how do we find our way out of fear and anger enough to move toward a sense of safety again? How do we grieve for those we don't know and for the truth of what we do know—that something's going seriously wrong in the world? And what of vengeful men with guns? The way these murders are mounting, there's no time for denial. Yet, based on how I'm feeling now, arriving at an acceptance of killing sprees as commonplace is simply not going to happen. I went to a holiday service a few days ago at a local church. They were honoring traditions from around the world and across many faiths. It was my second time visiting, and they welcomed me like family. Two women manned the door of the sanctuary and threw their arms open as I approached. They beamed at me and said, I thank God you're here. They'd said as much to the people in front and behind me in line. I warmed in their embrace, thankful that although they'd heard the same devastating news, they were holding fast to something much greater. They ushered me into that spirit and it was beyond good.
