April 18

As the details of the Virginia Tech shootings emerge, we all try to make some sense out of the magnitude of the violence and loss of life.

We are left with only the deep and uncomfortable feelings, and maybe a fleeting sense that something could have been done to prevent the tragedy. We imagine ways to stop the killing and we take actions to try to derail any future related tragedies. We think through various scenarios that we truly wish had happened - if only the school was more active in alerting the students of the potential danger, if only the gun laws were stricter, if only some supremely talented fighter could have tackled the shooter before his rampage. There are lots of "if only-s."

People are reacting in many ways, intense anger, students that want to riddle Cho Seung-Hui's corpse with bullets, more debate over immigration rules, blatant racism, even Bush couldn't help but try to score points with the NRA by insisting on his support of the right to bear arms. Predictably, I even read where liberalism is to blame for this disaster; leave it to the authoritarians to salt the wound.

I used to work in a hospice. I saw many people die right before my eyes. It was of course different, they suffered from cancer. Some died by drifting away slowly and peacefully, some died quickly and with difficulty. Most were older, although a few were younger. There is a certain precise clarity and there's no room for nonsense in the hospice. That is at least one characteristic of death and dying.

We imagine these 34 people still living in some way. That somehow their energy continues.

An excerpt from Thich Nhat Hanh 'no death, no fear.'

"In Albert Camus' novel 'The Stranger,' the main character, out of despair and rage, shoots and kills someone. He receives the death sentence for his crime. One day, while lying on the bed in his prison cell, he looks up at the square-shaped skylight over him. Suddenly he becomes aware of and deeply in touch with the blue sky above. He has never seen the sky in that way before. Camus called this a moment of consciousness, which is a moment of awareness or of mindfulness. For the condemned man, it was the first time in his life that he really came into touch with the sky and realized what a miracle it was."