Unspeakable suffering

Today I took the children off to the woods while their parents dealt with their shock and grief. The six-year-old child of a neighbor was killed yesterday in a freak household accident while her parents were at work and the grandmother was looking after the two children. The whole family is now wrecked. I can’t even bear to think of the grandmother.

Bella and Evan have not taken it in. The girl and her brother were/are students at the same elementary school they attend, but in not in the same years, and they’ve all been online instead of in person for the past year and a half. I think most children can’t conceive of the death of someone their age. I took them off to admire the wildflowers and look for bunnies (we saw several), birds (we heard hundreds), and the odd snake (Evan saw one). They were subdued, but I think they welcomed the time in nature, and I noticed that Bella, who is always very caring of Evan, was just that much more attentive to him today.

Cristina is close to the mother and has organized a meal train and other supports. When I arrived back at their house, near dinner time, Cristina was carrying burning sage into each room to clear the energy. Seth said this accidental death made him not want to take his eyes off the children, but as we dined on take-outs he began to talk with some excitement about returning to work. 

He leaves Saturday (the day before Evan’s sixth birthday) for a weekend concert. There are a number of tour dates booked now for the remainder of the year in outdoor venues and arenas. It looks like concerts are slowly gearing up again, and he showed us a video about his new state-of-the-art sound board with over a thousand channels (see Extra). [For those who don’t know much about concert sound for audiences of 60,000 or more, a board with 80 channels was awesome ten years ago.]