Tragedy...When the feelings gone and you can't go on...

title song and lyrics by The BeeGees

Mama Kat's Weekly Writing assignment:

describe a tragedy you didn't expect to be as deeply affect by as you are



First one must identify with what one would consider a TRAGEDY.

Strictly speaking the definition is: an event resulting in great loss and misfortune.

However, another type of TRAGEDY is: a drama or literary work in which the main character is brought to ruin or suffers extreme sorrow

Personal tragedies aside, because they are PERSONAL...

Lyrical or literary tragedies seem to get to me more than the actual physical, IRL (in real life) kind.

I think it is because of my job. I work with special needs children. Many of whom are very ill, and/or have very short life expectancies.

Before that, I worked in LTC (long term care-read Nursing Homes). My patients were the Alzheimer's and the ones with serious health issues like dialysis, coma or near-coma patients requiring hawk-like attention to detail to maintain their health and a quality of life worth having.

I believe that living with the daily occurrences of death and near-death experiences I have grown immune, for lack of a better word, to the personal tragedies one hears of on the news or reads about in the Newspaper - online of course as the newspaper stopped being printed last year!

Speaking of a tragedy!

Perhaps the tragic end of Steve Irwin, The Crocodile Hunter, is as emotional as I have gotten over anything in a long time.
Well, the oil spill in the Gulf was a close second...

I started watching The Crocodile Hunter on Animal Planet after the birth of TeenBoy. I would sit in bed with him and watch Steve and his new bride, Terry, head off into the wilds of Australia.

A place I have always been in awe of, and wanted to see for myself.

TeenBoy and I would snuggle together and watch Ole Steve-O 'til one of us, usually ME, fell asleep.
When TeenBoy was 17 months old BratChild was born and into the routine she came.
Then came SIX, and about the same time, Bindy Sue... the Mini-me of the Crocodile Hunter.

My oldest children enjoyed the show, but the younger ones?
They were raised with Steve and Terry. They loved watching him explore jungles and oceans and deserts. They learned more about the animals and reptiles a world away from that entertaining and intelligent man and his equally wonderful wife than any one can imagine!

With SIX being about the same age as The Crocodile Hunter's first child, and Steve and Terry being similar in age to myself and HeMan Hubby... an emotional connection was forged- on my end entirely, but real none the less.

I liken it to the way people watch Soap Operas and BELIEVE the characters are REAL people living their lives on TV...
only I knew these people were really real and were really living at least part of their lives on TV. The other part of their lives was their own, but I felt like I understood some of what that part, the part not shown on TV, was like.

They ran an animal zoo and rescued wildlife all over the world ... I had an aviary full of parrot species and was raising 6 children working full time nights with special needs kids... not too dissimilar, right?
Okay, not the same at all but... I understood being busy and over-extended and exhausted daily.

So, his death took me by surprise. Okay, that's putting it mildly.
It floored me. I thought of his wife and daughter, left to carry on his DREAM. Of his new son, who would never have any real memories or knowledge of the man who was bigger than life to so many creatures great and small.

I was so affected that I wrote an email to the family expressing my sorrow for their loss. And let them know how much the world would miss him.
I doubt The Crocodile Hunter Family read the email... but if perhaps someone did, I hoped that it would bring some measure of comfort, as it did for me to write it.

Kind of the way writing the blog gives me comfort, and sometimes even, little snippets of solitude to cultivate my sanity when it's dangerously close to being all used up.

Tragedy is... the death of a man who saw more than what was in front of his eyes... and had the courage to dream a dream AND make it come true... dying from a silly thing like a freakish stab to the chest from the tail of a stingray.