In the previous two posts I talked about the importance of saying the names of the dead and giving the gift of listening to survivors. I am closing out this series by discussing the wrongness of saying “you were lucky” to survivors of horrific events. Whether the person involved walked away unscathed or sustained horrific injuries, we seem to want to assign their survival to luck or chance. Is mankind (or womankind) really that shallow, thoughtless or afraid to think about death long…..
Two unimaginable events taught me how important it was to let the survivors of those events tell their story. Just like I did, they too need to tell and re-tell their experience in order to learn how to turn their unimaginable experience into an imaginable one. One boy survived the crash that killed Kalei. A couple of months after her death one of his friends phoned me and said, “Lorene, are you mad at Jared?” “Of course not” I replied,…..