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Life and death are unmanageable. We can’t change it, but we can accept it. Breathe. So sayeth the Dharma talks and the Whole Foods tote bags.
I was thinking about this when I read about Demario Bailey, a fifteen-year-old Chicago teen who was shot in the chest while trying to keep his twin brother from being robbed of his coat in December.
Actually I was thinking about his mother. It’s not Demario that I have trouble envisioning. I can, for some reason, easily imagine his last moments. The terror, heat, pain, sound of cars and screams fading as melting snow drips from the rusted joints of the aqueduct above your head. Maybe it’s because I’ve also looked down the barrel of a few guns and imagined my own death.
But his mother. I can’t imagine how she finds acceptance. How she breathes.
Acceptance is graceful and romantic when what you are accepting is failure to find a parking spot near a yoga class or, failure to get accepted into a PhD program.
But when what you are accepting is that your child, whom you have loved, and raised, and supported, and cooked for, and disciplined and yelled at, who is good, and responsible, and lazy, and loving, and goofy, and funny, and annoying, and incorrigible, can have his life-the life you gave him — taken, just 15 years into it, by a group of strangers, other peoples’ sons, in broad daylight, for no real reason, then acceptance is neither a noble, nor zen, nor peaceful proposition.
