For Danny Part 2

For Danny...

When your child has a best friend, that friend becomes part of your life, almost like an adoption. When the Lord takes them home you want to help your child find understanding. Well there isn’t any. A week later, still grieving, I’m getting away from the shock and sadness to angry tears. It is not fair. At 19, you still have your entire life ahead of you. All the conversations with him, trying to explain that high school may seem like everything now, but in 10-15 years it’ll just be a faded memory. The good stuff is up ahead. Well, he’ll never get to the good stuff. Part of me feels like I abandoned him, if we hadn’t moved to Colorado his safe haven would still be there. After a fight with his mother one night, I went and got him. Let him know that, that our house was open to him and he would always have a safe place to go. He took me up on that, sometimes staying for weeks at a time. We got along well and I hoped that maybe it's because I made more sense to him than his mother did, maybe it helped hearing it from someone else. Now I feel like one more person who let him down. Maybe if I was still there he would still be alive, maybe I should have brought him with us. Gotten him out of all that mess. Living in Vegas is hard on people if you don’t have the right frame of mind, the wrong paths are everywhere. If I cant make sense of this myself how am I supposed to help my son? They should have carried this friendship on for years that lasted beyond my own life. Still, just so angry.

This time I don’t know how to find closure. I'm turning back to a formally foolproof way of dealing with things to see if it helps. It just might, as I write this my hands are no longer shaking. BTW, it hasn’t escaped me that this happened in November. Doesn’t everything?

Danny 10/18/92 – 11/11/11

It ain't fair you died too young
Like a story that had just begun
But death tore the pages all away
Lord knows how I miss you
All the hell that I've been through knowing no one can take your place
Still, I wonder who you'd be today

-K. Chesney

Go with peace and love
Gather up your tears, keep 'em in your pocket
Save them for a time when you're really gonna need them
The sharp knife of a short life, well
I've had just enough time

-The Band Perry

Closure?

So many emotions over the last two days. When his death was announced, I rejoiced. We got him, he paid the debt he owed for his crime. Crimes against, not just the US, but humanity in general. I cried. I cried because I remembered. Remembered how I felt that day and the days after. Remember wanting to go dig with my bare hands and helpless to watch it all unfold on tv instead. Remember wanting someone to pay. Remember the stories of triumph and death that came with the war. How I felt each time I heard of another life lost. I remembered how devastated and upset I was when both mine and my best friend’s nephews joined the armed forces. Remember finding my friend sitting in the dark, staring out into nothing with half drunk 12 pack in his lap the night before he was to rejoin his unit. Remember last summer a friend telling me he volunteered to go back, it was all he knew to do and spending days trying to convince him not to. This time, he said, maybe the job will be finished. Not realizing til much later what he meant by that. Still hoping I am wrong. My tears were not ones of happiness from this man’s demise, but of remembering.

While waiting for the president’s speech Sunday, we watched on CNN the crowd start to gather at The White House. Waiving flags, they were singing the Star Spangled Banner and I got little choked up as the reality began to sink in and the memories started. We had sworn this day would come for him and it finally did. As the night progressed, the images turn to out and out celebrating. Maybe its my upbringing, but in my heart it feels wrong to celebrate death, anyone’s death. Did he deserve what he got? Of course and the world is better without him in it. Yet each time I see the celebration videos my heart cringes with embarrassment at the striking resemblances to dancing in the streets, in some cultures, after 9/11. 3000 innocent lives lost versus one monster, maybe that's the difference.