Mortality

Yesterday, one of my baby brother's friends died. I can't even imagine the pain that he is going through. You should read about Diesel here.

I have cried a lot since I learned the news early this morning. I only met him a few times and I have wept for him, but more often I've been weeping for my brother. He's not a baby. I call him my baby brother to tease him. He's 18, can bench like 300 lbs. He played football and knows better what he wants to be when he grows up than I do. I'm fiercely proud of him. He seems sometimes like a man. An actual grown-up. And why not? He's of age. He's big.

But, he really was a baby. At least he was until yesterday. Nothing grows you up like losing someone.

Also, I do, in fact, have a Crochet Bag post this week, but it'll have to wait. The world sometimes moves on in spite of our petty schedules.

Death in high school seems as inevitable to me as prom. We lost someone just about every year from my graduating class. The thing is, that I'd have to take out yearbooks to tell you who most of them were. Not because I was a callous kid, but because I didn't really know them. I watched other kids, kids I knew, grieve. But mostly it didn't touch me.

I've lost people. It's not that. It's that losing someone like this, a contemporary is different. When you lose family, especially aged family, it seems like the logical conclusion to something. When you lose family, it hurts, deeply, but it only alters your mind and your soul in that you develop a little hole where that person fit.

When you lose someone you love who is a contemporary, a peer, a friend, you don't just have a friend-shaped hole in your heart, you also have a growing sense of the reality of the world. The coldness. The unexpected effects of seemingly innocuous causes. The lack of sense and logic to the way things work. The knowledge that you can lose anyone, ANYONE, at any moment and there is nothing you can do to stop it. It forever changes your perspective on absolutely everything.

It's a crushing weight. And a weight that you have to bear while grieving someone you love. And one that almost everyone has to bear sooner or later. I just wish it was later for my baby brother.

More on this tomorrow. In the mean time, if you are a pray-er, please pray, and if not, do whatever it is you do. Pray for Diesel. Pray for his family, torn asunder. Pray for his friends, grappling with hard truths and a big Diesel-shaped hole. Pray for this community, who has lost a great kid.