1/12/2011 - too fucking awful to even have a name. . .

I don’t often take time to feel grateful for the things that don’t happen to me, but in light of the Arizona incident this past weekend and watching a heartbreaking "Today Show" interview with John Green, I am simply grateful for one thing: I have never lost a loved one due to violence. 

When Green said how he just wished that he and his wife could have been there when their daughter fell to the ground (she was with a neighbor), I lost my breath.  I don’t have, nor have I ever lost, a child, so I can only imagine the depths of grief John and Roxanne Green are facing after losing theirs. 

In Six Feet Under, Alan Ball’s amazing ode to death and all the life that happens prior, Brenda once said, “If you lose a spouse, you're called a widow or widower.  If you're a child and you lose your parents, then you're an orphan.  But what's the word to describe a parent who loses a child? I guess that's just too fucking awful to even have a name.”

It's easy, for lack of a better word, to feel sad and sorry for the Greens.  They lost a daughter, a victim for no reason other than location and timing.  And then they themselves became victims, thieved of a loved one they only began to know. 

But the parents of Jared Loughner suffered a loss as well, and I think theirs is so much more difficult to consider.  Theirs is a different kind of suffering, an unstable mix of sadness and confusion, devastation and guilt.

Because a convenient question to ask is how could they not have known that their son could perpetrate such an act.  Apparently, there were signs.  And maybe they even saw them, recognized a growing darkness or a loss of the spark that surely must have once been in their boy.  And maybe they ignored it, chose to shutter themselves away from the responsibility of having to "fix" a broken child.

But it seems that Randy and Amy Loughner were generally good people, albeit quiet and hermetic.  Maybe they were faced with facts that pointed toward Jared's mental instability, but they were unable to see past their expectations of him, of the happiness that they wished and have always wanted for him.  Maybe to face the possibility that the child they raised had turned away from them, turned evil and became his own person despite the best they could do was just too much to bear.  What parent could bear it?

I don't think anyone can ever know, but one thing is for sure: Jared himself was a psychopath.  No doubt.  I wonder, though, in whatever shred of sanity he has, whether he feels remorse, not for what he’s done (I don’t give him that much credit), but for the suffering he has put his parents through in forcing them to learn how to navigate the strange new world in which they live.

Because just like the Greens, they, too, live in a new world where they have to struggle to find meaning, where they have to craft themselves a story so there can still be meaning to be found in the world, where they can still believe in life, in God, in the force of humanity.

I doubt I am capable enough a storyteller to do so, and I'm grateful that I have never needed to be one.