Dead Souls in Chatsworth, California

Today is the day after the train collision just around the bend on a single track in Chatsworth, California. Desi and Lucy Arnez lived there with their children. John Wayne made movies out there at the Paramount ranch. I think it was him. Five decades years ago it was a place to get away from the city. It has long since become a suburb.

Now it is a place of sadness, anguish, and 18 dead souls and counting. 

Today, my friend from Northridge, next door to Chatsworth is coming over to pick up a coffee table that she loaned to my daughter. Tomorrow, the coffee table is going to Sacramento with my friend's daughter who is about 10 minutes pregnant, suffering morning sickness and exhaustion and excitement all at the same time. Her daughter and my daughter were married about two weeks apart last summer. All so carefully planned. 

Not so for the people in those train cars. The freight car probably had a couple people in it. Those happy-sad, mad-glad, short-fat, tall-thin, old-young people going home on the metrolink, tired from a day's work, excited or disappointed from a day at school where they had accomplished something worthwhile--or not--and those who just happened to be on that train going in the direction of Moorpark because it was their day for one of life's rite-of-passage, they all had souls.

Hopefully, they all had families. Families who will grieve for them, or with them, and what happened to them. For those, even that one single person, who did not have anyone, I grieve. It doesn't matter whether they are at the big banquet at the right hand of God, or their soul has been set free, or they are simply gone from this earth. 

Celebrating a life well-lived is a way to let go, float them away on a pyre, sprinkle them on a hillside, or bury them in a casket. But loss is real. A home sits empty, a chair unused, a bed half empty, an apple uneaten. That is real and someone must attend to it.

I shall mourn for the life lost in the shuffle. I shall pray for all the rest, that they may rest in peace or someone's loving care. This is pain and hurt and loss. It best not be buried beneath anger.

May no one use these dead souls as property in the name of a self-righteous get rich scheme.