Darkness

 

It’s a routine morning as I tend the animals and work on waking up and then with a crash I can almost hear, I remember my friend Marissa took her own life yesterday and the world is suddenly darker.

Marissa. A vibrant, compassionate, gifted musician. A wife. A mother of a 5 year old son and a 3 month old daughter. A home health care nurse and a woman full of faith. How could such a thing have happened and how do you make sense of it? Her devastated and bewildered husband collapses with grief and shock and an entire music community grieves.

By the next morning, a meal train has been established and it goes clear to Thanksgiving.

Her family and his are both local and they step up and in immediately. An absolute torrent of messages of love and support flood social media, offering prayers and play dates and even dog sitting. This was a woman who was not just much loved, but treasured and the idea that such a darkness as overtook her even exists is frightening. That it could be hidden is terrifying.

In less than 24 hours, a Gofundme account has raised over $20,000 and upped their goal to $25,000. A half day later, they’ve made the $25,000 and upped it to $30.000, the day after that to $40,000. I imagine it will be met if not exceeded by the end of the today. The messages on social media continue to mount – they are heartbreaking and it begins to be apparent that this lovely woman touched more lives than you could count. Childhood friends post pictures from school and work and evenings out, happier times that will never be again. How do you tell a little 5 year old boy that his mother is gone for always?

Absent some mitigating factor, it’s about the darkness, an evil and seductive trickster if ever there was one. She wasn’t incurably ill with some disease that would’ve savaged her body and mind and taken her life in the end. There was no chronic, untreatable pain. She wasn’t facing a life of incarceration without hope for release or working through some addiction. And yet, the darkness somehow convinced her that she was a failure and that her husband and babies and family and friends would all be better off without her. She couldn’t have been more wrong.

Most of the time, I’m not sure whether or not I believe in God or an afterlife but things like this make me want to, even if it’s nothing more than finding peace.