Easier

 It doesn't get any easier.

I've been going to therapy for years now.  I've processed, grieved, "made progress" in coming to terms with the hard things I've experienced.

Yet all it takes is one harmless instant, and I'm once again captured in the past.  As a student barely reaches over a balcony railing - safely surrounded and protected by adults - I'm suddenly a young kid again, trapped face-to-face with an overwhelmingly terrible and inescapable presence of pain so great, death seems like the only way out.

Growing up in a Navy town, two things surrounded me: water - a bridge connecting my home to the rest of the world - and military veterans.  So all growing up, hearing about and being stuck on the bridge during suicides was a regular event for me, sometimes happening multiple times a week.

And when you're stuck in so much pain that you decide you have to end yourself for it to stop, you don't necessarily have the presence of mind to realize there may be children watching you take your life.

There's no possible way to explain the feeling of witnessing something like that- not least because what you see physically is so simple compared to everything that takes place in your mind.  Physically, one minute they're there and the next they're gone.  There idles their car, and you know someone else will have to completes its crossing of the bridge.  Another life is gone, and there's nothing to do but let the stopped traffic continue on their way and let the witnesses move forward with their life.  It's almost treated like an inconvenience akin to rush hour traffic.

But while life mercilessly pushes forward as thought nothing of importance has happened, you somehow simultaneously move right along with it while being left behind, trapped in a black hole.  Your mind spins, wondering how something so horrible could be seen as the only solution, yet terrified to find yourself relating to and becoming more convinced of the same belief.  And your mind relentlessly beats you, screaming, "You looked away.  It doesn't matter that you looked back in time, because you still looked away.  Maybe if you hadn't, you could've saved him.  You at least owe him the decency to look, to not turn away like others undoubtedly have.  Someone's holding that much pain, and you can't even bear the lesser pain of not looking away."

The shame is stifling.  You'll later discover that your brain was sick, that you couldn't have done anything different, that looking away didn't cause what happened.  You'll realize and struggle to accept that what you experienced wasn't normal and shouldn't have been; that chores and school should be the biggest problem for elementary-aged kids, not being trapped in a frequent face-to-face encounter with intentional death.  But that's later.  Right now, you'll only feel the shock, the panic, the guilt, the helplessness.

And the guilt compounds.  Because when you're a kid, you don't realize what's abnormal.  You don't know what other families try to protect their kids from.  So when you see traffic on the bridge and ask if it's a jumper; when your friends become confused and you know their parents are upset with you, you want to take it all back.  You realize you've become the one who's given your friends a rude awakening you can't take back, no matter how badly you want to and what lengths you'd go to do so.

And even when that discovery and compassion and acceptance comes, it will never fully undo the damage.

So you block out the emotions, the fears.  They're too big, too confusing and scary.  But your best efforts can't expel it from your power, can't empower you to ignore it or set it aside.  And you can't shake the guilt of having looked away.  So now you focus on the facts: both about each individual story, and about the topic at large.

You wonder what's wrong with you, that you need to know how recovery of the remains works, or when exactly it is that they die in the process.  You need to know how often this is happening to your neighbors and friends.

Why do I tell you this?  Why do I take the time to dwell on this and explain such an awful thing to you?  Because today, one minute of harmless events have caused hours of reliving every image, every thought and feeling.  It took hours before the dizziness and trouble breathing subsided.  It pulled me away from being fully present and effective in an environment I dearly love and long to invest in wholeheartedly.

And I tell you this because I hope that it will do for you what it has done for me: strip all cliche, comfortable, easy feelings away from the concept of hope, replacing the cheap stuff with truth, complexity, overwhelming power.

When the darkness is so suffocating, that's when the light becomes something so gloriously victorious and deep and true that you can't help but cling to it, devote yourself to it.

Not to say I feel the most hope when things are dark.  Just the opposite: I don't feel it at all, but I know it.  It's only in this world's darkness that I see the wildness, the transcendence of God's staggering, infinite hope and victor.  We are finite beings trying to understand an infinite God; if we feel we understand it - "have a good grasp" on it - we're probably doing it wrong.

It never gets any easier.  It isn't supposed to.  Because we're still in the world.  And the only things promised us while we're in the world are trouble and a reason for courage in the face of it (John 16:33).

So I mourn and trust.  I hyperventilate and feel the pain stabbing at my chest.  I sob and bring God a throbbing, torn heart full of questions and doubts.  Then I beg for the strength to trust, without answers and closure.  I find a hope I can't begin to understand, a defiant trust in the light when dark seems so strong and victorious.  I cry for this world overrun with trouble, and hope in my God who makes all things new.