Questions That Remain

Seeing life, with all of its imperfections and sadness, through the eyes of a child is one of the most emotionally sensitive places you can allow yourself to venture. I thought about that tonight as I watched President Obama deliver his speech -- part elegy, part lecture, part inspiration -- in Tucson.

It was when he invoked the world as seen through the eyes of the little nine-year-old girl who was killed in last Saturday's tragedy that Obama touched a sensitive nerve, not just with his audience but within himself.

His wife wiped away tears that couldn't be restrained at those moments, and for an instant, anyone with a heart could sense how similar we all are, on the inside. We all hope for a better world for our children. We all expect to pass away long before they do. We all can empathize with their fears and hopes and demons and dreams.

It's when you try to see the world through the eyes of the nine-year-old who was cruelly and senselessly struck down by bullets that you feel the true weight of the darkness that resides among us as a people and as a species. That anyone could do what that gunman did last Saturday in Arizona, for any reason, remains unthinkable.

And yet that type of violence happens all the time, though usually on a smaller scale and with less public attention. In this speech, Obama summoned the emotions that -- if you allowed them in -- unleashed a wave of common grief over this sad state of affairs.

Somehow, despite all the tragedies and all the awful things that happen, some sort of essential human spirit endures. Even as one child was lost, other children hope and dream her same hopes and dreams. Some of those may even be realized on some future day.

I hope that as most people watched that ceremony tonight, they reacted just as people and not as adherents of any political philosophy, or with any agenda to push. It was an imperfect speech to be sure -- too long and rambling, and delivered at a university campus, a forum that somehow did not seem as solemn or spiritual as it should have been.

But that is how the survivors in Arizona apparently wanted to express the combination of grief at their loss and their commitment to a common future -- at more of a revival meeting than a wake. Still, the President handled himself gracefully and evoked the little girl's spirit in a way that couldn't fail to move anyone able to consider his meaning.

Our own losses, however painful, mostly pale next to those on a traumatic day like last Saturday in Tucson. As I listened to all the speeches tonight, and looked at the faces of the victims' families, I yearned for a society that can rise above partisanship and rhetoric to civility and a commitment to finding a consensus on the issues that matter. Not because division caused the killings but because divisions injure us in other ways,

But I'm not sure that this society can do that at this time. I don't know that we will come through this latest assassination attempt any closer at all to those ideals. The coming days and weeks will reveal whether we are capable of that, or whether we are not.

Obama chose a striking word to describe our lives -- "fleeting."  Our existence is indeed fleeting, even if most of us most of the time behave as if we had forgotten that. Maybe it is necessary for most of us to deny our mortality to endure our daily routines. Maybe.

Just like many may choose to ignore this opportunity to alter the overly divisive brand of character assassination that seems to have taken root in this land's political culture.

I'm not speaking here of any faction but of the body politic as a whole. One that a young President tried to prod back to civility tonight, even though many will find fault, some of it legitimate, in his attempt.

No one and nothing is perfect. We know that about each other. But the question is whether we can embrace each other's imperfections and make common cause together. I don't know the answer, but I do know that that is the question.

***

Across the years to other nights in another stage of life, now gone, I remember having telephone conversations, sweet and long. But the time of longing to hear a certain voice and then being able to satisfy that longing by the simple act of picking up a telephone has passed. It's little comfort now that night after night, across the barriers of time and place, across the mighty ocean, our conversations continued -- during an entire year of separation.

This was much like the state of military couples or others separated by work or circumstance for long stretches of time. Still, when the phone rang, no matter how late at night, my day was able to end in a most satisfactory way. Those times now are gone, never to return, not in that way or with the  innocence that has since been lost.

Most endings in life are uncomfortable. Rarely do they come at a time or in a way we would choose. More often, they are abrupt, unwanted and discordant. Sometimes all that is left afterward is anger; others an ineffable sadness. Most of my life, I've been prone to imagining alternative endings from those that have caused me the most angst.

As each of my parents died before my eyes, I imagined that somehow, at the last minute, doctors were able to revive them. When my marriages ended, I imagined us getting back together, and how happy that would make our children.

None of those things ever came to pass. Instead, everything passed away.

That's how things end, we know. What we don't know is how or when or where or even if a new life for us will begin. Will we be granted another chance? And if so, will we still be able to once again  imagine a new future as through the eyes of a child?

Again I don't know the answer, but I do know that that is the question.


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