Lightning Strikes

Could lightning really strike the same person twice? She looked at me with tears standing in her eyes and asked. Though she could easily have been speaking rhetorically, I searched for an answer. I felt like she deserved one. But, it wasn’t there. Only it was there, in the facts that lay before her. I just shook my head. I don’t know. How could lightning strike twice?

I was in the mix the first time that bolt struck. We shared a common loss, though hers was one I wouldn’t fully grasp until I had more years on the day, that day she first got blood in her eyes. She was 14 and a cousin robbed her of her uncle and a dear friend. Blood in the halls and blood in the eyes of a teenage girl. But, she didn’t have the luxury of attempting invisibility. She mowed the dead man’s lawn with a sister’s spirit smiling on her. She went to the only public school in town. She wrangled with wishing her own cousin dead. Mostly, she tried to figure out how these things happen. As if adolescence isn’t difficult enough.

Years later, a similar case. Different cousin. A grandmother taken from her this time. More blood in her eyes. Lightning came straight through the phone line and zapped her, just like that. And, that’s how they go... “Just like that.”

We sat together and I marveled that she was even still sane. I question my own sanity on occasion and I have only one day to wrangle with. She now has two. Two days that mark murder in her life. You want someone you love to have none. Ever. You don’t want them to know the range of emotions. You don’t want them to know forensic terms or legal talk. But, sometimes, the ones you love do know these things. And, if they have an ounce of feeling, they’re never the same. Headlines read differently. The sense of order you once had no longer makes sense. The same nightmares that keep you up at night keep you on edge in the day. If you’re from a small Midwestern town, it makes even less sense to you. If it’s family, it pretty much shatters the framework you grew up in. I’ve never really found a fully satisfying answer to why lightning strikes once. Now, I felt her pain at having to revisit that in the wake of the second jolt. Even scars that appear to heal nicely can pop open at any second. How to bandage this wound?

We can’t help but play “What if…?” sometimes, she and I. What if Happily Ever After had happened? But, since we’re both realistic enough, we don’t spend much time there. Mostly, we remember with love, look for wisdom, and agree that we’d likely have gotten along famously, just as we do now. But, I’d be lying if I skimmed over one of the strongest bonds we have. The shared blood. The missing and loving of the same person. The bond of knowing how the other feels when words truly do fail us. The loss of innocence that comes with innocent victims. People living their lives as best they can, opening their hearts to help someone, only to have their families face the headlines of their demise. These are the people we mourn together. And, not just our people, but every one. Every sister. Every uncle. Every grandmother. Every brother. Every aunt. Every child. Every father. Every mother. Every friend who posed no threat, other than the one imagined in the mind of a broken person.

When it comes to storms and lightning, we sit together and gently shake our heads.