Like A Stone

I remember waaaaay back in the thick of my drinking days being in a club one night when my friend nodded over toward another girl and told me that the girl's boyfriend had killed himself.  And that it was the girl's fault.

Even intoxicated, I felt deep compassion for the girl.  I wondered for the rest of that night and for a long time after what it must be like to be the girl whose boyfriend kills himself.  To be the girl that people only sideways glance at and call the certain killer.  To be the one who must certainly feel some level of responsibility no matter how it actually happened.  What must it be like to live with that?

And then I found out.

This is not a review of those events.*  I did my time, did the stages of grief, all that. God brought me through and I've already told all that I'm going to tell about that time for now.

That time did, as anyone should reasonably conclude, roll itself into the person that I am today.  In ways, I have discovered and claimed more confidently the person that I know I was created to be.  I am compassionate and observant and strong and capable (particularly in times of trouble.)  I tend to live apart from fear of judgement by others, apart from fear of crossing over the great divide, apart from fear pretty much in general...

With one, debilitating exception.

Where compassion and strength of will compel me to sometimes head straight into the trouble at hand and at other times compel me to walk away from it, that burdensome, bludgeoning fear of feeling to blame for someone else's end of it - that fear stops me in my tracks, clouds my vision, chills my bones.

This must be how it was for that girl from so long ago...it's like a stone that you can never heave away ~ that knowing that it can happen.  That you could be present. That you could be blamed.  You can work it out and come to truth about it in the aftermath but you never, ever want to have to do that again.




*Why I Believe In God