"It was so confusing. I feel like I wasn't enough to keep him here, you know?"
"What would you say to them?"
"But, the sparrow still falls."
"It will be in the past for the rest of time."
"I don't understand... how do people do it? I don't know how."
"The concrete is still drying."
-
I grew up always scared and fascinated by floods. I remember running out of my house and down to the creek to watch as the waters rose from a trickle to a menacing stream. I still have a piece of pavement from the road, in fact. This was when I could watch as water finally reentered my homeland after our long droughts.
I couldn't have imagined that one like this would hit my home, though. Children are dead. Parents are dead. Animals are dead. There are still more. Old friends help with rescue efforts. Family helps with clean up. I lay stranded in mind and spirit by the weight of it all. What good is a God that lets a sparrow fall, or a man lose his brother?
Perhaps, I'm led by ancestors who asked the same questions. My Grandma Sales sat in a nursing home asking the same question in 1981. She dipped snuff and died in '90. My Grandpa Clyde asked the same in 1966. He retired near that home in Fort Sill. I used to visit his home, where you could still feel his presence.
What good is it that God let a sparrow fall, or that a man lose his brother? What good is it that a mother loses her daughter, or a sister her brother? I don't feel equipped to answer these, and to be frank, I'm scared to ask such questions. As I write comfortably from my present home, I know mothers are grieving near my spiritual home. As I lie comfortably in my bed, there are fathers I know who have since known no sleep. And, I sit here unable to do anything but watch and write.
If it is any solace, either to your soul or mine, I am convinced that time flows. And, as time has flown, it will do so again. It is doing so now. And yet, for many, time stopped when the waters rose. These many are both living and dead, parents and children, mothers and daughters, fathers and sons.
For when I return, I am fearful. And when I wake, I feel guilt. When I smile, I am confused. And when I cry, I am lost.
When the waters rose at home, we used to be happy. And now, when I picture these waters, I see nothing but gravestones calcifying in the cemetery back home, and mothers' tears as their hands half-grip their child's stone.
Waters rise, cars crash, and bullets kill. And still, the child finds joy when they see a butterfly hatch from a cocoon; a brother finds joy when his firstborn grips his pinky; a son finds joy in his father's beer; and a little sibling smiles when he sees his brother's harmonica once again grace someone's lips.