So I'm sick.  I'm sitting here, quarantined in my own damn house, unable to do much of anything except cough, blow my nose, and struggle to find a position where I can both lie down AND breathe.  The house is a disaster, I have no idea what is going on in my classroom this week, and I'm rip roaring and ready to sit down and write a major bitch fest . . . when I look next to me on the couch and see my six year-old boy sleeping soundly.  Right before he fell asleep, he told me, "I love my daddy, and I'll never let anything happen to him."  Now, I'm not quite sure why he was talking about me in the third person . . . kind of strange - but still!  As sick as I am, as miserable as I feel both physically and mentally, as out of the loop I am right now with everything that is going on in my classroom, I get to fall asleep on the couch tonight with a wonderful little boy.

It shouldn't take a tragedy to make us realize what we actually have in our lives.  It shouldn't take someone else losing a loved one, for us to look around and truly appreciate how lucky we are to have so much love around us.  It shouldn't - and Lord knows I try so hard to take a step back every now and then and soak it all in - but for many of us, these tragic moments are the only things powerful enough to snap us out of our sleepwalking routines and bring us back to reality.  It takes a tragedy to make us realize our own lives are not so tragic after all.

I have lost two cousins to suicide, one as recently as this past October.  Both times, the immediate families and friends were blindsided.  It's only after the fact that people start to put two and two together, to notice little hints, little signs of something being not quite right.   Afterwards, everybody wonders what he could have done to stop it from taking place, or what she could have said that would have eased the victim's pain just enough to make him want to go on living.  That's what truly sucks about suicide - it dooms the survivors to a lifetime of guilt, doubt, and asking questions that can never be answered.  It's a torture that even Dante could not have envisioned, and that dude was pretty messed up.

Somewhere out there tonight, there are family members struggling to find answers that won't ever come, and friends punishing themselves for not doing everything, anything, to stop what just happened.  Hopefully, all of us can help them in the following days, weeks, months, years - but at the very least, burn this incident into your mind's eye and use it to make your place in the world a bit of a better place.   As for me - I have a son to go hug, and a few prayers to say before I drift off to sleep.