Lives and families take a long while to construct. They are the product of memory, of experience, of thousands of repetitive episodes of the mundane. Of night time tuck-ins, or morning wake-up calls. Of late night pick-ups, Of meals prepared. And shared. And moments of greatness and of nothingness. Of hugs and tantrums. Families in whatever shape they take are honed over a lifetime of experiences, not all memorable, but all bricks in the wall that construct the web of togetherness.
Rearing too is something that is never complete. Children who grow from being babes to teenagers to adults are never fully grown. They are forever the children of their parents, the siblings of their siblings, the cousins and nephews and nieces of their cousins, nephews, and nieces. Jigsaw pieces that create something whole and colourful, full of emotions of love and sadness.
And then in a moment, it can all be shattered. The jigsaw pieces can be thrown up into the air. Families are deconstructed and the feeling of sadness is universal. I couldn’t sleep well this week thinking of the incident in Buncrana, when in an instant a family was decimated. Sunday was a joyous blue-skied day, the type of welcome spring sun that brings out people after the winter hiatus.
That family went for a spin. A simple Sunday spin. And then it all went wrong. Horrifyingly wrong.
On Tuesday morning, in Brussels, other families awoke to a normal day of togetherness. By midmorning, everything had changed for them forever. Some people never came home.
All over the world, families have been splintered because of accident and evil, because of circumstance. In the dusty streets of Syria. In the shade of an African tree. We find shock in the chaos nearer to home because we are fortunate to come from a part of the world when public death is not commonplace.
At this very moment, there are children crying in dusty streets, there are people covered in blood and ash from chaos that does not make the headlines, there are injustices being carried out that make this world a lot more unsafe than it used to be.
The world is in a dangerous state at the moment, there is constant flux. The certainties we thought would remain steadfast are anything but. In three months our currently government-less country might be cut adrift from our near neighbours politically; our continent is abandoning decades of prudence and care by outsourcing the refugee problem, we are throwing the human rights of those men, women, and children to the first taker for a bag of shekhels — and a reality TV show star is just a race away from the White House, spouting hate and ignorance.
And it all creates within us a state of confusion, of fear, of dread. What parents did not hug their children more dearly after the news came through from Buncrana and Brussels?
We can all play a role in ensuring that there is no race to the bottom in how we treat people, that we do not eschew compassion and empathy and responsibility for what is popular. It is up to us to ensure that those who can influence things do so with love in their hearts. And that starts with us.
