GQ has a beautiful, haunting article about Cecil Ison–the amazing dad of my great good friend Sunshine (whose mom is exceedingly awesome too, not to mention her husband)–and how the scars of war are always with us:
One day Cecil would make a wind chime from branches collected on his farm, one branch from each type of tree killed in the storm—oak, pawpaw, walnut, pine, apple, maple. He would paint the words i will sing the beauty of trees on one limb. And on another: trees. hummingbirds. honeybees. The forest would regenerate itself, blackberry briars would flourish in the sunlight that poured through the trees, attracting the creatures that feast on them: songbirds, butterflies, and dormice. "The earth is resilient," Cecil would say. "You have your scabies over in this corner, a nice fresh breeze coming through here as a result of the hurricane happening over there, and that’s all part of the earth."
But when the storm first happened, Cecil mourned, and the people who love him saw it as a piece of what broke him. The beginning, or middle, of the end.
(Via said husband.)
Please, please read it and be thankful for what you have and that people like this are in the world and then angry that they have to endure such pain and then back to grateful again because they’re so amazing anyway.