Silence.

There is no music in the house this morning.  The chattering of the children at breakfast has ceased.  There is only crying.

We live in a world of death.  Death is everywhere. Always.  We don't think about it much, otherwise what would we get accomplished?  Some will tell you that you can't live that way, thinking about possibilities all the time.  But death is there.  You can drive by any hospital and rest assured someone in there is fighting for their next breath, doctors are trying to keep connected the gossamer thread of life of one of their patients.  You can drive on any road for that matter and know that it has seen some life slip away.  We don't think about death much, until the phone rings and the world goes all topsy turvy when someone on the other end of the line says the word.

And so it was this morning as one of my sons' coaches called to let us know that one of the girls on the team was killed in a car accident.  The world is sitting askew.  We're all reeling badly from the blow.  One child went back to bed.  One child roams the house aimlessly.  I cry.

They're learning young that life is fragile and can shatter swiftly.  Just yesterday, at the end of the year party, they laughed, they played and bantered and a few short hours later one of them passed from this life.

There are really no words for a family that has just lost a daughter, and it's not just rhetoric.  There really aren't.  No amount of words can heal the gaping, horrid wound that gashes their souls at this time.  Words won't stop the hemorrhage in their broken hearts.

In our humanity we try to make sense of this as our inner parts try to grasp the workings of death.  Death is unpredictable, random.  So we don't believe it,  we get angry at it, we bargain with it, we get sad, and somehow we try to accept it.  Then we do it all over again, in no specific order.

There will be time to reflect and let reality work its way into life, but for now we must live in the chaos of unwanted change.