I Can't Explain

I can't explain. I have tried. When my son looks to me for answers in the wake of yet another bloody flurry of violence, I feel his anger and his confusion, and I feel the same. Except I am the father. I am supposed to make sense out of the world for him. I try to find words and I try to find reason. I try to find words.

There are no words.

And yet, I keep searching. I thought there were rounding a corner. I thought we were headed for the finish line. I thought wrong. There are still people killing people. There are still people dying. Dying for a cause is one thing, but when the cause springs from the death of one or more, something is still wrong. What is the lesson that we are supposed to learn and why haven't we learned it? Why haven't I learned it and passed it along to my son to clear up any mystery that still remains?

There are no words.

And I keep writing, because I saw the pain on his face. Because I saw the pain on the face of the families who will now miss birthdays. Holidays. Christmas. That empty chair is going to be there forever. Empty. Missing. Gone. The wounds we hear about, the wounds we see, they are not the ones that linger. Families will feel the loss for decades to come. I want to say that there is a solution, a way to fill that hole. Those holes. Bullet holes.

There are no words.

And I keep wishing that I could make it all stop. Find those words of magic that make the prayer services and the rallies and the marches so powerful and so moving. But not powerful enough to stop a bullet. Why isn't anyone listening to "Thou shalt not kill?" There are too many other words, all of which do nothing to stop the killing. Which is all we claim to want. I look at my son and listen to his frustration and I wish I had a way to make it alright.

There are no words.

In the end, there is only love. The love I feel for my son. The love he feels for his friends. The love his friends feel for their city. The love we all share. I wish I could tell him that when I was his age, I was angry. I am angry now for all the lives lost and all the empty chairs and all the pain and all the anger and death. I feel as though my generation had a chance to make a change. Maybe we still do, but now I need to prepare my son to go out into a world that is still suffering, still searching.

Searching for the right words.