Reminders

 Congratulations!

If you are reading this, you are a survivor. No one has voted you off the island!

Yet. 

Rob Reiner and his wife were not so lucky. Nor were the two students at Brown University. Nor were the fifteen people celebrating Hannukah on a beach in Australia. And my colleague of so many years who taught fifth grade. 

Blue Oyster Cult would like to remind us not to fear the reaper, but the friends and families of one hundred fifty thousand souls who depart this earth each day might beg to differ. The marks we leave aren't always apparent until we go. 

Some of us leave behind a filmography. Work that will be seen in perpetuity. Some of us have extended family who will keep the story of our lives being told. Tales from our childhood. Legends of near misses and almost was. 

This is the job of the survivors. Like Mia Tretta, a junior at Brown University who had been shot in the abdomen during the 2019 mass shooting at Saugus High School in Santa Clarita, California. Two of her classmates died that day. Two more of her college classmates were killed this past weekend. 

Mass shootings in Australia are extremely rare thanks to a series of common sense gun laws. But that didn't keep horrible people from doing horrible things this past Sunday in Sydney. Hannukah will now be forever a day of remembrance for those who knew the victims of that massacre. 

And then there are the ones that get no press coverage. The passing of a fifth grade teacher in Oakland, for example. Not a crime. Not a story for the media to pore over. But a story nonetheless. 

As story for survivors. 

Like you.