The Hamlet Project

We really do need to be told a few times when something like this happens. We’re most of us, not really equipped for this kind of terrible surprise.
We have to say, “What? – I’m sorry. What happened?”
I’ve gotten several calls over the years – the kind letting me know that someone I’d cared about was gone, usually a suicide – and the brain just does not compute. It can’t grasp the reality of the information. Even a stranger – I was glued to social media on August 12th when the car killed Heather Heyer in Charlottesville. I’d been watching and sharing and trying to be of help from a distance all day and when the news broke that a guy in a grey car had just driven into a crowd, it was incredibly hard to process. I saw the videos of people immediately after. I saw the chaos. I soon heard that someone was dead. For a while, the word was that it was a 12 year old kid. It is a terrible feeling to feel a little relieved that it was an adult woman instead. But then awful again. Because we watched it in progress, really. And even if you were following – you needed to be told twice. She’s dead. She was hit by a car. She was murdered by an angry white supremacist trying to inflict as much damage as possible and now she’s dead. Murdered. Dead. Murdered.