Posts Tagged ‘grief’

Oscar Fulgham thought he was prepared the day a massive tornado leveled much of Tuscaloosa, Alabama. The 69-year-old former Army staff sergeant told the Los Angeles Times he’d been watching weather reports and planned to take refuge in his bathroom if the twister moved toward his one-story duplex. But no matter how much you think you’ve prepared for the unexpected, it can still catch you off-guard.

“You can’t believe how fast that thing was moving,” Fulgham said. “The sky turned black, and then it was on us before we had time to think.”

Fulgham made it to the bathroom just as violent winds clawed off the roof, exploded the windows, and blew out the walls. Six seconds. Fulgham survived, but in just six seconds, his home was gone.

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From King David’s ancient psalms lamenting his conflict with son Absalom to artist Pablo Picasso’s masterpiece mural commemorating the 1930s bombing of the Basque town Guernica, human creativity has been inspired by real-life tragedy.

What sets apart portrait painter Samuel Morse isn’t that his life influenced his art, but that the inspiration wasn’t expressed in charcoals, oils, or watercolors but in the invention of a new language.

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Like a lot of people, I was wary about wading into the waters of social media. What would I find? Who would find me? But after a few weeks, it had been a wholly positive experience of reconnecting with old friends and making new ones. Then one night my cousin Karla posted a note to me on Facebook that made me realize reconnecting can come at a price.

She’d just heard from someone she hadn’t seen in years. Naturally, her old friend had asked about her children, specifically her eldest son. “You think everyone knows, then you realize they don’t,” Karla wrote. Her 22-year-old son was killed on New Year’s Eve 2001.

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