Do you know the scene in The Wizard of Oz when Dorothy wakes up, points to all of those around her and telling them about her dream, she says, “And you were there, and you and you”? I saw this movie when I was 9 or 10 years old, which was 2 or 3 years after my grandfather died. I remember wondering if when I woke up in the afterlife, I would find all of those I had loved and known who had died before me gathered around my bed, nodding indulgently while I told them that I remembered them from before. I found this image oddly comforting: Being able to say to those whom I had lost, “I know you! You were in my life. You, and you” and of meeting again others whom I hadn’t thought much about since they left, of saying to them, “I remember you. I see now that I have missed you and didn’t know it.” I would feel the sudden population of a void I had sensed and been unable to fill until that moment.
It’s an image of a life being chipped away, one living piece at a time, to be reassembled, rebuilt again that fits my idea of everything being, eventually as it should be. It isn’t that I have ever thought that when a person dies, they ‘go’ to another place, though I am sure that someone at some point explained death to me that way and not really accepting it. I remember well wondering, if my grandfather had “gone to heaven” why was his truck still parked outside?
Today I am remembering a beautiful, sweet, bright and talented little girl, whose parents loved her well, took care, great care with the nurturing of her body and spirit, and whose life was taken from her by the offspring of other parents who inculcated the worst rather than nurtured the good in their own. This is a scary place. I don’t want to admit that I wonder what if about my own child, but how can I not, when more than twice now, in the last 2 months, I have had this possibility thrust before me in the form of news of such violence? They say that the Czechs have an enduring faith that things will eventually be as they should be, and a feeling that they may not know what ‘should be’ is. It is something that I admire about Czech character. It is something about them which makes them both more substantive and stronger to me. But today, I am having a hard time, a very hard time, in seeing how the taking of the the life of someone who was good and decent and headed for a lifetime of healing others could have anything to do with what should be, or with accepting that I can’t say what ‘should be’ is. Something evil has destroyed something good. Surely, this is not part of what should be.
