The Human Tragedy of Untimely Deaths

Holes in our Hearts Never to be Filled

Today they are laying to rest my niece.  She was an elementary school teacher for most of her life.  She lived in another town about sixty miles away and is part of my ex-wife's family, so I have not seen her in years.  She was a year older than my oldest boy.  I remember her as a little girl.  I remember that she wanted to be a teacher from an early age.  She was smart and a hard worker.  She married a bricklayer and raised two fine boys.  I am told that she was looking forward to teaching Summer School for the first time this year.

Two weeks ago, she was hospitalized with a stroke.  She was 51 years old and in perfect health.  The blockage to her brain was in her carotid artery.  She needed surgery to remove that blockage.  After that, her brain started to bleed.   Four days later they brought her home to die.  Two days later she died in her own home, in her own bed. 

No one in her family is questioning this woman's death.  You and I know what the cause of her death most likely was.   She had a blockage in her carotid artery that required surgery.  This is not a small clot we are talking about here.  I don't know the size of the area that was blocked but the carotid artery is a fairly large blood vessel that feeds blood to the brain. 

She was vaccinated with one booster.  I am sure she thought she was protecting her kids.  A little more than a year later she is lying at the bottom of a six-foot hole.  Her reward for trying to do "the right thing" was a state-sponsored execution by lethal injection.

So my family is going through a tragedy right now.  People go through them all the time.  But this one has made me think about the human tragedy of untimely deaths and what it does to us.  In World War One the British decided that in order to win the war they needed to raise a new army from the ranks of the population.  A call was made to join Kitchener's Army and nearly two and a half million British men soon volunteered to save the world from the Huns and fight the war to end all wars.  From every corner of the country, from large cities to small towns, the cream of Britain's male population joined Kitchener's Army.  Entire classes of students joined together.  Regiments were formed from warehouse and factory workers, who would later fight side by side in the trenches of France.

Many of the divisions that were formed from these volunteers were sent immediately to the front to fight in the new great offensive that would later be called the Battle of the Somme.  On the first day of the battle, the British suffered 57,470 casualties with 19,240 killed in action.  In some cases, entire volunteer regiments were nearly wiped out on the first day of the battle or during the engagements that followed.  Thousands of mothers, fathers, sons, daughters, grandmothers, grandfathers, uncles, aunts, cousins, and friends were soon notified that their young men were dead and all their classmates were dead, and all their workmates were dead and all their buddies were dead; all lying in the mud and the shell holes of a faraway battlefield.

I try to imagine what it would have been like for all who knew or loved them, to find out that they were all now, gone forever.  I try to imagine that grief, that sorrow, and that loss.  How does one replace an entire generation of your finest young men?  You can't replace them and the world you now exist in is forever different.  Everything that they could have done or would have done will now forever be left, undone.  All of their potential to change the society, the culture, the race, and the world was now gone. 

In the upcoming months and years, many people will be leaving us.  Some of them are really bad people (you know who you are) but many of them are good hard-working people who thought they were doing the right thing.  Each one of them will be a tragedy that will affect everyone who knew them and everyone who loved them. And for us, those who will be left, those who will be witness to all the millions of tragedies about to unfold; we will be left with things, never-to-be-done, and holes in our hearts, never to be filled.