Words fail me...

Kansas City doesn’t make the national news very often. Outside of the occasional tornado my parents typically don’t hear about anything that happens in my part of the country. But when I called home on Sunday the first thing they asked was “What happened at that mall?”

For those of you who missed the story, on Sunday a gunman drove to a mall in town and opened fire, killing several people before being shot by the police. It was a story that made me take a step back as I drive past that mall every day on the way to work. I’ve shopped there. It is part of the scenery of my daily life. To find out that a shooting took place there, to drive past it the next morning and see the police tape was just surreal. It really isn’t something that you would ever expect to encounter in this part of the country. I joke about it but this is the quiet, suburban part of the country and you grow to embrace the calmness.

I was hoping to write tonight about the surreal feeling of watching this unfold in a place you know. That and the fact that the Fox affiliate waited until the end of the Nascar race to break in with the news story (which now makes me hate the channel even more.) But a few hours ago I found out something that completely changes my perspective on everything.

I found out that I’ve met one of the people who was killed on Sunday. She played on one of the other teams in our Wednesday night trivia game. I’ve seen her week in and week out for the past year. She was a very nice person on a fun team and was one of those people that makes playing trivia worthwhile. I know that it might be tough to understand but there is a community built up amongst those of us who head out on a Wednesday night to just sit around, drink beer and show off our useless knowledge. To walk into your regular night out and discover that someone will no longer be there for a senseless and random reason just leaves you stunned.

I’m not sure what I should write here or even how to react. Tonight I was forcing myself to crack jokes as that is one of my few defense mechanisms in this situation. It’s an old Irish view of the world, counter sadness with laughter. But that’s just an attempt to hide from the emotions and not a very mature view of the world at that. How are you supposed to understand a situation like this? She did nothing wrong, she just pulled into a parking lot to go shopping. Life shouldn’t be that random. As much as I would like to believe that the world is run with logic it pains me to find out that something so horrible can happen to someone who did nothing to deserve it.

All I can say, all I can think right now, is that this just shows how precious life is. How you need to embrace every moment that we have here. To enjoy every interaction, every relationship, because you just do not know how fleeting it may be. And that even though the world is senseless and unfair at times, you have to focus on what is important in life.

I hope that you can keep Leslie and her family and friends in your prayers this week. I really don’t know what else to say.