Lacrimae rerum

I am rather busy lately, and Auletta has been unusually clingy, so I don't have much time to blog.

Somehow I was unusually affected by events in Mumbai last week, especially this story. Don't click on it if you are prone to crying and don't have time to cry right now. I wept when I first read it and could barely stand to open the link again to put into this post. I think any of us with children would lay down our lives for them without hesitation; it is not heroic or romantic to say that, it just is what it is. And I can't imagine any grief greater than losing my daughter. But I am an adult and have some range of experience, comprehension, and emotional capacity to handle the death of a child; a young child who loses his parents--who, no less, witnesses his own violent orphanification--loses everything that gives his universe meaning, and he has no way to process that experience. It utterly breaks my heart. It's not even something that moves me to anger, or makes me think primarily that this is something I hope to God never happens to Auletta, it just hurts to know that this awful, irrevocable thing happened to this one boy halfway around the world. Why it is this one thing, and not a million other tragedies that happen every day, I don't know, except that I'm sure I wouldn't have reacted this way before I had a child. But there it is.