When words fail

Along with the rest of the country, I've watched in shock and sorrow all week since the explosions at the Boston Marathon. A friend of mine was running, but since she finished about 25 minutes earlier, she and her family were out of the blast zone when it occurred. Thank goodness.

Faces haunt me: the faces of those who died, of those who were so cruelly injured, of the people who love them and are suffering with them. And yes, the faces of the two young men whom we believe (or at least hope) were solely responsible for this terrible act.

I'm a writer, but this is one of those times when I think that words fail us. There are no words that can adequately plumb the grief and horror so many people are trying to endure right now.

And there is no word that can explain to us why these two bombers were able to do what they did. One of them is the father of a three-year-old girl himself; how could he kill and maim other children? The other was, by the account of everyone who knew him, a kind young man who even volunteered to help people with Down's Syndrome.

I don't know if that factoid is true, but as we struggle to understand how people could perpetrate such a heinous act, we resort to two words over and over: evil and insanity. In my view, neither word explains a thing. They are simply labels we use to try to comprehend what is incomprehensible. It doesn't help me grasp how one person could unleash such unspeakable violence on others to call him evil; that begs the questions of what evil is, and how he succumbed to it in the first place. Calling him twisted or psychopathic or sociopathic or radicalized doesn't help me either. Again, how does someone who seemed to fit into society for so long suddenly whip around and reveal a wholly different face?

Evil, insanity—neither word helps me make sense of tragedy. They merely open the door to other mysteries.

In the end, I think we have to accept that we will never truly understand how human beings—who are capable of such courage and compassion, as so many others have demonstrated in Boston all this week—can also be capable of such cruelty. The best we can do is bind up our wounds when it happens.