Four Funerals and a Wedding

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 I write this with the heaviest of hearts. And for once, I can be fully sure that if you are reading this, you share in this common pain humanity is going through these days.

The past week has been especially trying for me at a personal level. Waking up to deaths each day sounds chaotic and uncalled for. But it is the state of affairs now. Those like us who are alive and well, find ourselves stuck in this eternal loop of guilt and grief - The guilt of waking up each morning to languish in the grief of losing those who didn’t get to see the sunrise again.

It is called survivor’s guilt - This collective feeling of helplessness that we are going through, trying to help those in need in the best ways we can. I have never seen humanity rise up to a challenge like this ever in my lifetime. I am proud and saddened at the same time, that this awakening of human kindness came in the rudest of manners.

We keep asking God or whichever higher power we believe in, the reasons for this untimely genocide. We don’t seem to find an answer. All we see are funeral pyres burning like wildfire in a world that can’t seem to be able to help anymore.

We keep wondering how to help those who aren’t within our means to help. We feel sick and sad and just appalled at how much we have to face as a collective generation trying to make sense of this mayhem around us.

I am reminded of a prayer that I heard at a wedding ages ago. It is called the Serenity Prayer and it reads,

“Lord, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference”

-          Reinhold Niebuhr

So this is what I hope for us today.

That we find the serenity to accept that we can’t control people’s deaths after a certain point. We find the courage to reach out to those people that we left during testing times, because life really is way too short to hold grudges and that we find the wisdom to realize that whatever we are doing within our personal limits and capacities is Enough and More!

Because Lord knows we wouldn’t have helped out a random stranger if not for these times. And if we wake up each morning hoping to not hear about another death, go about our day praying to not come across another grieving soul, doing things to make sure at least one person feels better each day – we are doing our absolute best and that’s all we need to know.

And till we find a calmer tomorrow, I pray we find the peace within because we can only share what we have inside of us and right now, more so than ever, peace is what we need.

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