MONDAY BLUES (3)

A TRAGEDY IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD

Good morning friends,

I know this is a sad topic to begin the day but life can be so cruel at times. When I read that the casualties in the ongoing Ukraine-Russia war included children, I couldn’t stop my tears. Why are the innocent children made to pay with their lives for no fault of theirs?

Whenever I read any news or a story that involves a child’s death, I feel very sorry for the parents of the deceased. It’s difficult enough to lose your loved one, especially, if it happens to be either of your parents or your kids.

A couple of months ago, one of our neighbors lost his five-year-old daughter to Covid-19. The child already had several health issues including a problematic spinal cord. She couldn’t sit on her own and lay down most of the time. I always saw her being carried by her grandfather to get exposure to the sunlight. I didn’t see her little corpse or I would have been completely broken down.

There was another tragic incident that took place around 6-7 years ago. A 13-year-old son of another neighbor went to visit a temple with his playmate. Both the boys went to wash their feet in the nearby temple pond, when one of them slipped and fell. The other boy tried to give a hand and raise him up but he also fell. The pond was quite deep and so both the boys drowned. Their parents conducted a frantic search for several hours until the bodies of the children were recovered by the local divers. It was the saddest day of my life.

I realized that life is like a garden where some flowers are wilted before they could fully bloom or like an orchard where some fruits are destroyed before they could ripen. Let’s appreciate every moment of life while we are still breathing on this earth.