mourning — Page 2

Harder Way to Christmas from Chad Herring on Vimeo.

A sermon preached at Southminster Presbyterian Church of Prairie Village, Kansas. December 16, 2012.

* * *

Natasha was a classmate of mine.

I moved to University City, a suburb of Saint Louis,
just before the start of 7^th grade
and Natasha sat next to me in my Algebra class that year.

She was so bright, and we developed a friendly competition.

I don’t remember much of it,
but I do remember doing quite well in Algebra.
I would regularly bring home scores of 95, 97, 100%.
And I was proud of it.

But Natasha, she was always a bit better than me.
We would compare scores,
and she’d trump my marks with her perfect scores—
plus extra credit.

Natasha was my friend.

Friendly, and so chatty.

We’d talk about her inordinate love for Michael Jackson one day
and her affection for dogs and cats another.

That year, fresh from the small farming town of Atlantic Iowa
I had few friends.
But Natasha welcomed me with a smile and a goal:
to beat her, just once, on a math test. I don’t think I ever did.

I can’t stop thinking about Natasha this week.

She was my first introduction to gun violence and mental illness.

[Read more…]

I was moved by this collection of 10 “last pictures taken” of the subjects prior to their death.

Some of those included are Will Rogers, Albert Einstein, Elvis Presley, Anne Frank, Abraham Lincoln, and Lady Diana. Also included is John and Jackie Knill, who were among the several thousand who perished in the Christmas tsunamis of 2004.

From the description of the Knills photograph:

On January 13, 2005 the bodies of Canadian couple John and Jackie Knill were discovered on a Thailand beach resort. They were two of the many victims killed from the December 26 2004 tsunami. Weeks later a Seattle man doing relief work found a damaged camera and discarded it but kept the memory card in the camera. After downloading the images he discovered pictures of the Knill’s enjoying their vacation, as well as shots of a huge wave approaching the shore. With each picture it shows the wave getting closer and closer to shore. The last picture taken of them before the wave hit (shown above) was shot just after 8.30 am on December 26.

Interesting Fact: The Seattle man that discovered the images recognized the Knills from a missing person’s web site and contacted the couple’s two sons in Vancouver Canada. The man then drove from Seattle to Vancouver to give the sons their parent’s last images.

The Lady Diana image is also fascinating to me, and there’s one of photojournalist Bill Biggart, who died at ground zero on September 11, 2001. I thought I’d pass it along.

(h/t Andrew Sullivan)