Timeline

We're in the white Avenger, rolling through the steam and rain toward the second young person's funeral we'll have attended within the span of four days.  

Sweet Pickle is asleep next to me, sufficiently warm and cozy-seeming in the simple cotton outfit I traded for the pin tucked seersuckery number I had laid out last night in expectation of fair weather.  

The grown-ups in the car sense ourselves suspended within the gravity of the situation -- the burden of loss upon our loved ones, the mood's correlation with the unrelenting weather.  We hold our breath as we pass over flooded ruts in the road, clenching teeth, white-knuckling the interior.

Jack White warbles over the crackling rear speaker:

"I'm just a-goin' over Jordan;

I'm just a-goin' over home."

There is no ease in a day like this.  Faced with the impermanence of life, its fickle promises and its dismissal of human attachment, I borrow worry.

Why this child?  And this one?  On what basis does God choose the bearers of  sorrow?

Would it help if I even fractionally understood His reasons, His design?

Every time I see a parent mourn (regardless of whether they are a biological or spiritual 
parent to that child), will I always be stalked by the possibility that we somehow dodged the same sadness that now exists only in an unrealized parallel timeline.

(And I just read the lasts sentence and realized that no need to stop internalizing my Star Trek obsession....)