I am a hot mess. I was crying so hard at school the other day that even as I tried to pull myself together to go get my students from Music, all it took was a colleague asking if I was okay in the hall and I lost it completely.

I cry in the car. I cry in the parking lot. I cry on the porch. I cry in bed. I just can’t seem to get a grip on all that is happening.

James is in pain. We thought the horrendous cough, extreme fatigue and the nausea that kept leading to vomiting were unbearable, but the pain has convinced us we didn’t know what we were talking about. The meds work for a day or maybe three, but then they aren’t enough and every movement, every moment is uncomfortable or worse. We’ve finished our fourth treatment, but not without incident. We spent an absolutely miserable night in the ER a couple weeks ago – because of this same pain – only to come away knowing that it’s the cancer causing the pain – the tumors in his abdomen are growing -and we have to just wait and hope that it’s just “tumor flare” that’s the cause. His oncologist and all the nurses, even the ER doctors assure us that “tumor flare” is very common during the beginning of treatment, that the tumors often enlarge or swell before shrinking from the therapy, and while we will hold on fiercely to that very hope, it’s hard to take that as the best news when it means he is still miserable.

So we try, with all our might, to stay positive and to boost each other up, but he is frustrated with how little he can do. Between the pain and the fatigue, he feels controlled by this disease in ways he wasn’t prepared for so early on. He made the very hard decision to stop working at the end of last week. We positively refer to it as his “retirement,” even going so far as to celebrate with cake – but the reality isn’t lost on either of us.

And then yesterday, driving home from his latest treatment, when the hospital visit had been “blissfully uneventful,” stopped in construction traffic, I happened to glance at my phone. “Don’t read it,” James said. “Just put your phone down.” Another school shooting. Even looking at those three words lined up together just blows my mind. Another. School. Shooting.

I cannot even begin to explain how this feels to me right now. I teach fourth grade. Sandy Hook was nearly more than I could bear, truly. But now, this? It’s too close to home, it’s too similar, it’s too goddamn possible. And so, for the past 24 hours, I have cried more than is perhaps reasonable, out of a fear I don’t know how to contain any longer. Sandy Hook was too similar, it was too unthinkable, it was too tangible for me to ever really get past. Robb Elementary feels even more so.

This world that we live in is full of such evils. A place where children die at the hands of other children; where cancer strikes in the most absurd and devastating ways; and where there just isn’t enough therapy in the world to help me make sense of any of it. I am trying, so desperately hard today, to feel blessed. I am trying. I am struggling to have faith that there is more to this, that there is hope, that there is light, that there is meaning behind any of this at all. I am trying. But today, today, I am at a loss. I am at such a loss.

God be with those families in Texas. Each and every one of those precious souls. My heart is in agony trying to comprehend any of it. There is no blessing in any of it.