Losses remind us to be grateful

I was all set to continue with part two of our vacation high jinks, but then this last week happened, and our communities have been rocked by an unimaginable tragedy, as a family lost everything.

National headlines screamed about nine family members lost in a flash flood in Arizona, and a baby in Iowa died from an infection she possibly contracted from a kiss. My heart is just broken and I grieve for all of these families and those that loved them.

I know I am not the only parent who has squeezed my kids a little tighter this week, or gone back for just one more good-night kiss.

I know I'm not the only one who has run around the house frantically checking smoke detectors and batteries and trying to make my children understand the need for an emergency plan, without creating an anxiety that will keep them awake at night, like I am.

It is terrible that it takes a tragedy like this to see the true colors of a community, as it rallies and mobilizes to provide for those in need.

While we have these bright spots of compassion and hope, and we fulfill our needs to do "something," it doesn't change or take away or minimize the overwhelming loss and the fact that a family will never be the same.

I just don't have a lot of humor in me this week. Instead, I find myself thinking about a friend from a long time ago.

She had grown up next door to my grandparents, and off and on through our childhood, we were casual acquaintances. Over the years, my grandmother kept me up to date as her life followed much the same trajectory as mine.

We graduated from college within a year of each other, followed a career path for a while, ended up getting married within a few months of each other, and even delivered two boys and a girl, in that order, after some difficult pregnancies. After my grandmother passed away, I no longer got the inside scoop, but I assumed she was living through the same chaos of juggling a family that I was.

One day, as she was collecting her children from school, she was killed in a horrible, freak traffic accident. I'm not sure why the passing of someone I hadn't spoken to in years rocked me to the core the way that did, but to this day, when my children are driving me crazy and I am sure that I can't deal with the nonsense for one more minute, she is the person that I think about.

I think about how much she would love to be here to break up one more squabble between her boys or step on one more piece of Lego, or how patient she would be to untangle her daughter's bed head, or how grateful she would be to prepare just one more healthy, well-balanced meal for her children, even though they were going to complain like the dickens about eating their broccoli.

I have a complicated relationship with grief. I have lost a lot of people in my life: my grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, and too many friends. Some of these deaths were a welcome respite after a long and full life, others came too soon and left a hole that will never be filled and questions that will never be answered. Losing my father five years ago was undoubtedly the most devastating to me, but my father left us with very strict instructions not to waste our time grieving for him. This insistence of his was in many ways one true last gift to me. While I miss him daily, I can hear his orders in my head and I do my best to honor them and remember his joy and zest for living.

But he never told me that I couldn't grieve for my children.

I grieve for wisdom that he will never share with them. I grieve for the naps they never got to take, snuggled on his chest as he stretched out in his recliner. I grieve for baseball games and dance routines he has not been here to see. I grieve for the stories of his adventures and the flavor that he could give those tales. My own secondhand retelling will never come close to recreating the excitement he could give a narrative. It's the loss of what could have been that weighs me down like an anchor.

These losses always serve as a reminder of how we should be living our lives and what our priorities should be. It seems like a terrible price to pay for something that each and every one of us already knows.

For the next few weeks, we will all be a little kinder to each other, a little more supportive, a little more generous. Then, the chaos of back to school will overtake us.

Life will go on. Our tempers will flare, we will laugh at the absurd. I just hope a small voice in our head reminds us not to take the simple things for granted.

Liz Pinkey is a contributing writer to the Times News. Her column appears weekly in our Saturday feature section.