A girl named Lily was murdered.
I hardly knew her, and yet I can’t stop thinking about her… and her parents.
After my best friend was killed when I was a kid, I overheard a man say, “God has his reasons,” and that was the final straw in my tenuous belief in the God I was raised with. And if I learned anything from that experience, it is that platitudes hurt more than they help in the face of abject despair. My friend’s death was an accident. Lily was killed deliberately. The truth has some very dark stuff in it that none of us understand.
So, just in case it helps, please send love to Lily’s spirit, and to her parents.
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Everyone that I have spoken with in the last few days ranging from kids who knew her, to parents whose children attended the school, to parents whose kids didn’t attend the school, to gardeners, doctors, people down the block, all have been stricken by this tragedy. We are thinking about it all the time; what made her get in the car? What was her time like with this perpetrator? Her final moments? The agony that her parents must feel. Was the murderer so abused as a child himself that he had let go of all humanity? We need to understand this heinous act, yet that is absolutely impossible.
Does it help to send prayers? Perhaps. Is this a teaching moment for our children, as one friend suggested? Perhaps this too. Answers, none.
I’m going to go look at my sleeping child and hope that he will always remember my embrace.
The tears that I shed for Lily and her parents are a release of agony from my heart. For myself there are no answers for a tragic death. I only feel that we must give more of the love inside of ourselves to those that suffer.