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perfectly_chaotic
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I sat in one of these last night. It was incredibly difficult for me to do so.
At first, I found my mind wishing to be confrontational. Especially during the first speaker, who was a fire fighter paramedic, who basically sputtered out a bunch of statistical numbers which did not really tell you much because, due to the way they were defined, they could have been interpreted in many ways. The only thing he said that even seemed human was that it was difficult whenever he has to tell a family that there loved ones are dead. I could imagine the burst of bone-chills that one must feel while doing something like that. I imagine it would be as if the whole sky was caving in around both him and the person which he was telling. Most of the rest of the time he seemed to simply be pointing the finger and blaming drunks for these deaths.
The second speaker was much more moving. This is when the presentation began to get much more difficult. The woman's 24 year old son was killed by a drunk driver while he was riding his mountain bike. She pretty much told her son's life story and then talked about how distraught she has been for the last 12 years. Her story since his death has been one of a depression which crippled her for the first four months of every year. Every Sunday at 9:15pm, the time she discovered her son had been killed one Sunday, she would break down for many years. She still ends up stopping whatever she's doing every Sunday evening at this time. She spoke of the hundreds of friends at his memorial services. It was very difficult for me to hear this.
I had decided to do begin doing meta practice by the time she had started speaking. As the course of the evening went on it only got more difficult.
The next speaker who came up was an older man. He told a series of stories about people who had been in wrecks as he was a young man and the suffering that he and others went through. His best friend had returned from Vietnam, where he didn't even fight and simply stuffed bodies into bags, and after would go for walks all the time. His friend would say, about that experience, that he wanted to walk it off. So they would go on walks all the time. One evening, when he did not go along, his friend was struck by a drunk driver. He watched his best friend die in the hospital. His friend's mother blamed him for her son's death for the rest of her life because he did not go on the walk with him as usual. Years later, he was driving and a car was approaching from behind at a speed of over 100 mph and he drove into a ditch to avoid being hit. The car followed into the ditch and the resulting collision left his wife in a coma for 6 months. The drunken driver said he thought the road, which was a road that went straight for many miles in both directions, turned and was following his head lights. When his wife woke up she was in a wheel chair for the rest of her life. She ended up having to get repeated surgeries and her husband took care of her after she was a paraplegic, after she had a urostomy, a colostomy, and later an amputation of both legs. It was so hard to continue the practice as I began to feel the pain, anger and suffering that he and the many others in his life had went through. He then went on to tell a couple more stories of others who ended up drinking, driving and crashing even after hearing his story.
There were moments during that hour and a half which made practicing metta feel absolutely horrible and somewhat pointless. By the end it was a continuous struggle to stay present with another piece of the suffering of our world. Yet, I am still here alive in the midst of it all. Even after they'd lived through all of that suffering they are still there trying to shed a light on much of the suffering of the world. It is amazing how much suffering the choices of one person can spread throughout the world. The suffering I've witnessed and lived through hardly scratches the surface of the pain that is out there.
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