Poo-tee-weet?

And so it goes. Too many times over. And me, we--life?-- just goes on. And on?

Really, I just don't know why this is so hard for me to understand, but it is. I'm not getting it.

Last week we lost one of my favorite novelists, Kurt Vonnegut Jr. Which is why the repetitive quote "so it goes" kept running through my mind on Monday while I flipped the remote back and forth between watching Cheruiyot and Grigoryeva triumphantly press the finish line tape and the VA Tech tragedy unfold on Fox News. I honestly can't say if the tears I wiped from my face were from watching the marathoners triumph over adversity or from the horror of the VA Tech tragedy. I do know that I don't even cry when I am the one finishing a marathon.

I know that those touched intimately by this tragedy feel like the world has stopped spinning--and for them it has. They are standing in a suffocating fog while just outside of the thick it is all going madly on-- just as it always has and will?

And even though I sit on the other side of that fog I have spent the past few days reaching into it and thinking of those enveloped by it. Yesterday as I went on about my dailies I was boggled at how much it really does just go on. Yeah, maybe I am an idiot-- the slow one-- but it does truly baffle and astound me how things just go on for some while everything is frozen for others. Which, I guess, falls right in line with what my Dad has always told me: "That life isn't fair." And that too has perplexed me since I was 4 years old. And like Beau of late annoyingly says, I too have asked my entire life Why? why?why! why! why.why.why. . . You'd think--at 35-- I would have reconciled that too by now, but no, I still can't quite put my finger on it either.

Really, these are ideas that I just vaguely sort of get. It hurts my head too much if I try and think them all down. I don't know how he did it but I am so thankful to Vonnegut for hashing it all out and putting it in print and making a go of explaining it. That has helped me some and let me try to put it all in its place.

So it goes? Sigh, deep breath, exhale. Wow. Okay. So it goes, he says and yesterday as I went on running, finishing up some work for Ryan, rushing off the get the boys from school, meeting with Beau's speech teacher to discuss next year's therapy plan and watching my sister try on and then buy her wedding gown I was again and again reminded of how gifted my life is right now and how unfair it is for those mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, wives and husbands to have all lost something so irreplaceable. How inexplicably lucky I am to be on this side of the fog and how frighten I am to know that the edge of that fog is such a perilously thin and permeable layer. My safety net is as thick as a molecule.

On and on and on, wildly it goes.

May those that have lost somehow find some comfort in each other. My heart, prayers and thoughts are with you.