Friday, October 02, 2009

Bad news gets harder to stomach

Maybe it's just me, I suspect not though: my ability to watch stories like those coming out of Samoa and Sumatra has deteriorated since having kids. In fact even since genuinely falling in love, something I now know I've only done once.

When you care about someone, or ones, so much that life itself becomes unimaginable without them, stories of death and loss seem different. I realise how relatively indifferent I was, and probably still am, to my own death.

A person comes on the screen now and talks about losing all of their children, or the love of their life, and my gut churns as I dwell, momentarily, on how that might feel. Not that I know how to properly empathise with such unimaginable horror.

There is nothing else to add. I hope the numbers prove too pessimistic, I hope many more of the missing turn out to be sheltering somewhere, protected by something, alive.

2 comments:

The Accidental Housewife said...

Making the decision to have a child is momentous. It is to decide forever to have your heart go walking around outside your body.” Elizabeth Stone

canberra boy said...

Very nice quote from Elizabeth Stone, there, AH.

Armagnac Daddy, I was interested in your reaction to recent disasters. I found that parenthood made me very sensitive to news stiories about the suffering of children and animals. It's not unusual at our place for my partner or daughters to say "daddy's crying again" when we watch the TV news...