My children are worriers. They come by it honest. Do you remember the shooting at the movie theater in Aurora, CO? Hopefully no one has forgotten. One of my children hasn’t, and every time we go to the movies she gets worried. She tells me, in her sweet, soft voice, that she likes going to the movies but that she worries someone will come in and shoot her.  Parenting is humbling in so many ways, and this is one of those “bring me to my knees” conversations.

I’ve been able to give one part validation: of course that was horrible and scary and I understand your fear; and one part reassurance: no one is going to hurt you and that won’t happen to us. It’s a lie, right? People will hurt her in life and crazy shit does happen to innocent people.  I look her in the eyes and I tell her everything is going to be OK. And then I give her a long hug, as if it might create a force field of sorts around her that can deflect a mad-man’s bullets.

Yesterday, the kids took a big step towards independence – the kind of independence that no one thought twice about when I was growing up. They walked from our house to the local movie theater with two other friends, about 1 mile. It was a beautiful summer day, they had money in their pocket for a stop at the ice cream store and they were happy. And then my one who worries about being shot in a movie theater says, “I want to go, but I’m worried. You know. About someone coming in with a gun.” I look her in the eyes, hands on her shoulders, digging deep inside myself for confidence and authority but adding a little light-heartedness, and I say, “We know all the crazy people in this town and none of them own guns. No one is going to hurt you in the movie theater.” She smiles a bit and asks, “Who are the crazy people in our town?” and I tell her that we might be on the list of crazies and that some of our dear friends might be on the list, too. She relaxes and they’re out door.

Two weighty issues here: the soft lies we tell our children to comfort them and to maintain their sense of security, and crazy people with guns! Our society fails the mentally ill. Not many seem to care  and yet we all pay dearly for this state of denial.

I might be an atheist of sorts. It’s not that I’m a nonbeliever, it’s that I believe we don’t truly understand the inner workings of our universe, both physical and non-physical. We seem to have a small grasp of the physical arena, but the spiritual eludes us. For the record, I don’t believe in a God that sits in heaven and manipulates our existence. I do believe we – humans and other animals, the earth and all that it contains, space and all that it contains – are part of an intricately woven web. This “we” is deeply linked, bound and influenced by the different components. I think the answers to who and what we are, are beyond our imagination. The only element that I have confidence in is the concept of love. Love is mighty powerful and part of the answer, part of the reason, part of the basis for this web. (I’m going to go eat some granola and dance in a fairy circle now…ha! I can hear my Midwestern family thinking those thoughts about me.)

I believe that the idea of afterlife was created when a small child turned to his or her mother hundreds of thousands of years ago and asked, “What happens to me when my body breaks and I leave you?” And that mother, because let’s be honest it realistically was the mother, looked into her child’s eyes and said, “There’s a place where we will all be together again”.   And you know what? Hundreds of thousands of years later, I said the same thing to each one of my children when they asked. I think there is an afterlife; I’m just not convinced it looks anything like what we have here on Earth. I omitted that last thought, though, because there’s not a lot of comfort in the idea that something happens to our being after we leave the physical body, but I can’t give any details or provide a thread of familiarity for my child to hold onto. That’s like saying, “Go ahead. Jump in the ocean by yourself. A lifeboat  – or something that might resemble a lifeboat – will find you eventually. You’ll be fine”. I wouldn’t jump.

And then there are our mentally ill. I say “our” with purpose. (It doesn’t have anything to do with being a socialist, although some might accuse me of that. Fine, I don’t think it’s a dirty word.) The “our” goes back to the intricately woven web where we exist together…and the love. We need to take better care of one another. There’s no honor in allowing our young, ill or old to fend for themselves. What we do – or don’t do – for these marginalized or vulnerable groups is a reflection of how we value life and humanity. And apparently we’re suffering.  I don’t have answers for this one, yet. I’m thinking about it. We need something better to catch our most vulnerable when they fall.