Black

I got a text from my cooperating teacher yesterday, asking for prayers. One of my former kiddos had been in an accident and, at that point, was in brain surgery. The kids at the school were all over Twitter, asking for prayers. I sent out a mayday on Facebook, joining my own prayer warriors with theirs.

I got the text tonight while I was at dinner with a friend that he had passed away.

What do you say at a moment such as this?

I remember his face. I remember the tattoo on his arm - the one with the small birds emerging from a black void - that I always meant to ask him about but never did. I remember him being one of the only ones who would laugh at something I'd say from the back of the room when it appeared no one else was listening.

He was a talented artist with a contagious smile, second from the front on the far left.

He had the kindest of spirits.

His whole face was lit by his laughter.

And what do you say when that light is snuffed out long before its flame was meant to flicker?

Something deep within my throbs at the thought of this lost light. I can only imagine the sense of darkness that his friends and family must feel, to now be denied a soul that was so full of joy, so filled with potential. Oh, where would he have gone? Where would his talents and that infectious energy have taken him?

It is right to ask "O death, where is your sting" because it is rarely a sting that the Great Thief leaves. It is a bruise. It is an ache. It is a "something missing" that once was so familiar you hardly noticed it was there but you don't quite know where to go next now that it's gone. The morning will come. We will get up and get dressed and go to work and carry on, and soon it will be something we remember, though we won't know what reminded us of it.

But tonight we will grieve. We will smother our screams with our pillows as rage and disbelief and denial and questions boil forth. And we will collapse, exhausted, in sleep - far from peaceful, far from comforted.

Rest in gentle peace, sweet boy. You were a brightness to many; you were certainly encouragement to me. And your light, though unfairly taken from us, will never be forgotten.