The Fingerprints on my Kitchen wall...

I've been trying to figure out how to talk about this rationally and I can't.

Because there is no rationale to this.  

There are children that lost their lives.

There are adults that stood in the way and bald-faced lied to a madman.

My heart aches.

It hurts.

I've read their names. 

I've cried along with a nation full of people who are trying to make sense out of the senseless.

I put up a Christmas tree today with my girls.  Bended branches this way and that, putting lights on, and candy canes.  My heart really wasn't it, but I cherished my times with my girls and my Jude's incessant babble and her bitty ways of being not a toddler but not a big kid. 

Tonight, there's a memorial service.  Our President addressed the family members who have lost loved ones. 

I walked out to the laundry room to swap out the loads of clothes and as I passed through the kitchen, I, once again, noticed the smudgy fingerprints that are all along where the table butts up against the wall. 

Fingerprints everywhere.

Smudges of peanut butter toast and of dirty fingers that have picked up gravel rocks on the way home from school because they're part of her 'collection'. 

I touched my hand to them and thought of the parents in Connecticut.  How they would stretch their own hands against their walls.  How they would relish that lingering every day memory of where their child had been. 

And the thing of it is, it's not fair.

None of this is one bit fair.

I'm angry and hurt for these men and women. 

One life lost causes a ripple effect.  You have no idea how many lives these children, these adults touched.  How many children they taught before.  How many have passed through those halls before.  How many lives are affected by one person....

....it's like throwing a boulder in a pond.  

And in the days to come I don't want the memories of these children and adults to become this trite bit of policy that will be bandied about.  Because once upon a time they were flesh and blood.  They weren't a news story. 

They were here.

They laughed.  They cried.  They scrapped their knees.  They got the chicken pox.  They got the flu at three a.m.  They got sent to their room.  They got stood in the corner.  They had birthday cakes.  They had wishes and dreams.   

They weren't doing anything but going along with their lives and doing what they were doing and they shouldn't have to had to die for it.


I'm mad as hell about that part. 

I'm trying to wrap my head around a way to make that part better. 

I pray. 

I think aloud with my husband and we both agree that it's just a sad, sad situation. 

And I just wonder what one person can do to make it better? 

When do we just settle on kindness as a way of life instead of it being a 'random act'? 

Do we have that all year around?  Is that naive?

I do realize that grief is a driving force for change.  It moves mountains. 

So does faith. 

So does hope. 

And today, yet, still....I have so much hope.