And a meditation I posted elsewhere, but not here

This is kind of odd, but I wanted to pass it along, in case it helps anyone else who is grieving. A little while ago, I watched the Pianist; I'm sure you've all heard of it...with Adrien Brody playing a Polish Jew in the Warsaw ghetto. i know plenty about WWII...my grandfather fought in it, I've read plenty of books, taken the classes, seen Schindlers List...none of them touched me like this movie

I cannot be so callous as to describe my own experience as being like that of the Jews in the Nazi occupations, but what the movie did make me feel was a sense of kinship for a person who was forced to live through a person (in his case ALL of his people) dying in an inexplicable and entirely inhumane way. I was left, after watching the movie, with a burning need to reconcile it...to understand in my mind how anyone could justify something like an extermination camp. One person, like GMH...you can say they are crazy and wash your hands. But to convince so many other people that such feelingless murder was okay?

Somehow, in all my reading on the subject that I did that week (Towards the beginning of December 2008) I touched into something that helped...this discovery of what happens when a person, or group of people, is allowed to be incomplete or unfinished. Germany was broken, wounded and starving to be fixed. They were looking for something to fill their hole, their wound.

Mere's death was inexplicable...and she was used, like a resource, to fill an unfinishable whole in a broken soul. GMH will always be broken...always looking for something to make it better. In this case, Mere was a means to a few more hundreds (he hoped) and if not, three hots and a cot for the rest of his life. Sometimes in life, those things that are complete and are beautiful are gobbled up by the empty things. In Germany's case, it was a broken nation, looking for its own identity...trying to define itself by what it was not.

And sometimes we are forced to live through senseless and carnivorous death and are unable to do anything about it.

Except to tell their stories. The fact that I can help Mere in this way, to keep her alive and give her life for those who were never touched by it directly; it is a gift. Some people have to die for their people, and others have to live so those that came before can never die.