Sometimes all the sorrow of the world can be overwhelming, as not a day goes by where we don’t hear about a death, mass murder or terrorism that pierces our hearts.
Last week was no exception, including the senseless death of more than 80 people when a truck plowed through the crowds in Nice, as they celebrated Bastille Day, the equivalent of Canada Day, the pride of Liberty, Equality, Fraternity. The violent attack of a man driving a heavy truck through these crowds was an attack on the core principles of the republic.
The individual moments of human loss really wound us: the children happily riding on their father’s shoulders the moments before the attack. Someone calling desperately for help for their mother. The pink girl’s bicycle left abandoned and overturned on the road.
This would be the debris of our own lives were we to experience such a loss.
Closer to home, many people mourned the loss of Taliyah Marsman; an Amber Alert had been issued for the missing five-year-old but ended after her body was found last Thursday by Calgary police.
Our hearts have broken a lot lately, and the closer the tragedy hits closer to home, the more we feel the pang, the sympathy as well as the fear of thinking, “What if that was us, what if that was my child?” I know there’s been more than one moment where I haven’t been able to find my child in the crowd, the heart-squeezing panic of thinking the worst, and I can’t imagine what it has been like for her family, and now, to feel her loss.
It’s a strange thing, how hard it is to appreciate something you’ve always had or taken for granted. We can see, we can hear, we can walk, we can talk - but perhaps we don’t often think about how amazing it is to have these brilliant faculties, crafted by billions of years of evolution. I always think when I am sick and miserable with a cold, my head so barely stuffed I can barely breathe – ‘Why don’t I appreciate how amazing it is to be well and healthy? When I get better, I am going to revel in it.’
Not one of us, on our own, can solve the world’s problems, it’s true, and that can be a helpless feeling. We can be active, volunteering citizens, we can engage in our communities, we can run for office, we can use our vote to effect change, but we will never be able to stop tragedies from occurring, and even more terrifying, we never know when that same tragedy might hit us.
There is nothing good about the way Taliyah died, or the way the victims in Nice were killed, or the way countless men, women and children die every day for lack of the things we take for granted every day: food, water, shelter, and living in a country at peace in itself.
But hopefully these losses remind us to appreciate the things we do have when we have it. Let them remind us all to hug our children a little closer at the end of the night, to be kinder and more grateful to our spouses, to call our mothers and fathers and say that we love them, to do something as simple as be able to move our lips and give thanks for every breath within our body for as long as that moment exists.
