Goodbye, November.

It’s hard to imagine the entire month of November, gone in a blip. It isn’t, of course; its legacy of high school suicide will be with my community for a while… at least, one can hope. These things shouldn’t pass quickly; we should be reacting and engaging for months to come; engaging with our kids, with each other, with the educators who look at the empty seats for the remainder of the year. Figuring out why some kids are in pain significant enough to turn their most fundamental instinct against them.

I wonder how we have created a community without adequate sympathy or empathy for emotional pain. It’s become tiresome. Go to church, take a pill, have a drink: get over it… Please. Everyone has something difficult happening, so we encourage each other to suck it up and act okay. Like everyone else. I don’t think that’s going to teach our kids how to face their worries and anxieties any better than it taught us, and they are looking at us to make sense of how to manage their lives.

What if we openly shared that life is sometimes excruciatingly difficult, and that it may be very difficult during the years just before, and just after they leave home?

What if we could open ourselves up (soon) enough to make a difference in their lives? Would we manage to push ourselves into that level of discomfort, knowing that they might be better off?