Mourning the T-P

Did you see the photo of the one dog grieving and refusing to leave the dog who had died after being hit by a car? That's what being a friend sometimes amounts to. Sometimes all we can do is grieve, privately or publicly.

My training tells me this of grieving:
It is hard.
It is long.
It never ends till we move on, and there is no set time and date for moving on.
It is something we hold on to because we're terrified of being disloyal by letting go.
It is common in all our loss.
It, to quote someone, somewhere, sucks. It always has. It always will.

I believe my friend Jeff Duncan said it best: We lost a friend yesterday. Oh, this friend didn't suffer at the end, and the end came quickly despite the friend being ill for quite some time. Even though we absolutely know it is coming, it always shocks us how quickly it comes. We're never, never prepared.

Like Icarus, we fly too high., then we crash and burn.

But beyond losing a friend, yesterday, there was a loss of a way of life. Oh, how hard that is to get past, to grieve, to mourn, to feel like shards of ice on a bare hand.

I've had a subscription to a newspaper, a printed newspaper, the kind of item one can hold in one's hand with one's morning coffee, since I was, well, counting the years of the afternoon newspaper The Meridian Star, all my life. Daily. For 40 years, I've missed maybe a day or two at a time of reading a newspaper, of home delivery, of treasuring good writing and searching into the small print for box scores and such. Heck, I learned to read by studying baseball box scores. Really. I did.

I wrote my first story for a newspaper when I was 15. I wrote roundups for the local newspaper as a senior in high school, still playing football at my high school. I did my own sports newspaper for my high school because I felt the campus "newspaper" we had wasn't good enough. I was paid for my first story in the spring of my senior year.

I stopped writing two plus years ago, taking what they call a buyout and early retirement to pursue my true love, being a pastor. But I've never stopped reading. I thought I never would. Perhaps now, with the loss of that friend, I will. I can. Perhaps even I must.

Yesterday the local newspaper, The Times-Picayune, announced it was ceasing to be a daily come the fall. No more Mondays with the Saints, learning what was said inside the locker room and such. On days of wins, which were much, much more frequent lately, those were my favorites. I worked for the newspaper in management in the sports department for 14 years, then demoted myself to return to writing and did that for another five or six. From the first time I went there, looking out at the Blue Plate sign in its blue brilliance late at night, I felt a sense of home that I didn't at places like USA Today, the Reno Gazette-Journal and even Jackson's Clarion-Ledger. It was where I thought I would be till they pried my arthritic fingers from my PC or my laptop.

Oh, the material will probably be on-line. Probably. But it's just plain different. It's like finding another friend after losing the one you loved. Sure, it's great to find another friend, but no one could possibly replace, nor should they try, the one we had.

And that's just the newspaper.

Dare I say I felt more sorrow for what this probably will mean for real, human, feeling, friends? I know they must be filled with great fear about what will come to their jobs, their lives.

I can only say that this too shall pass. I truly believe that. No matter the fear of change, change will come. No matter the fear of loss, loss will come. It's what we do with our lives after the change, after the loss that will prove how well we've lived.

I, of course, believe that God will no put on us more than we can handle, though that phrase isn't exactly Biblical. Still, its theme is carried out throughout the Bible. Mother Teresa, however, used to say that she and God were constantly involved in an argument about how much she could handle.

I believe we, they, those writers, ad people, editors, delivery persons, can come back from tremendous pressure, fear, distortion of what they perceived to be their future. They can. Jobs are jobs. They are not life. I believe for many of them, who this morning are wondering what else they can do professionally, will find new avenues of work. I do. Believe, I mean.

We will all go on. We will. Talent and hard work are not exclusive to journalism. Some will go into the digital age, despite no one being sure how to make a profit out of it. Some will go into radio, into television. Some will go into insurance sales or some such. Each of thems, to various degrees of newness will go on.

I know how blessed and fortunate I am that there was a God waiting with a different calling for me. I'm not dumb enough to think I had anything to do with it. Others have the same God, if not the same opportunity. But all must walk that new road, away from the known, into the darkness of the unknown. It is that lack of the sureness of the future that is so frightening. But the Bible tells us that none of us know what tomorrow will bring, so worrying about it is quite useless.