while someone else is eating or opening a window or walking dully along . . .

It's hard to think of things to say when someone you love takes their own life. . .

shit, sometimes it's just hard to think. . .

Instead, I'll share this poem by W.H. Auden. I vividly remember reading it in high school. It was one of the first poems (along with Whitman, Tennyson, et al.) to really affect me and it's lesson has stayed with me always.

Musee Des Beaux Arts

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters; how well, they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

--W.H. Auden

To see the poem alongside Breughel's painting, go here.


Much love to you, Kara.