Gone...

If I tell you that one week from today you will exist only as dust in a small container, would you believe me? Surely not. No one person who's life is sondering on at a normal or better pace would ever assume similar. Such is surely the case with a young woman whom recently lost her life when her beloved horse was spooked while out on a brief ride. Unfortunately, the young woman in question was the near-fiancé of my brother Joseph.

I got the frightening message from one of my housemates last Saturday that my sister called and it sounded serious. Immediately I picked up the phone to find out exactly what was wrong. She shakenly delivered the news and the ripple of shock and sadness that started on the outskirts of Vancouver near a horse stable continued its way through Tacoma, Washington. It next hit Sarah and the two friends we happened to be watching a movie with and continued outward after we took an eerie, fog-shroded walk from campus back to Sarah's house where it then hit Sarah's housemates and one of their boyfriends.

Over and through the next week, that ripple pressed onward out to Pullman, WA where a friend of mine wanted to know if an article that his mother back in Vancouver told him about was true. It was. The shock and emptiness that was propagating in this area spread ever further out to her father in the Southwestern U.S. and over oceans to her mother in Germany. But as far as my feelings and I are concerned the epicenter of it all lay directly in the heart and soul of my dear brother.

With subsequent (and unavoidable) events come reflections of that ripple. Only care and love provided by friends, family, and near strangers can calm the waves of emotions that course through my brother's being. Only this and the constant trudge of time will heal him. But then again, this is all relatively easy for me to say. I can only barely begin to comprehend being so close to something so devastating.

Death is new to me. I've got a lot to write about.

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