Why Doesn't the World Stop When We Lose Someone We Love?

It's a Saturday morning and it's quiet in my house. My husband has taken our 3 year-old to swim lessons and my 1 year-old is pretending to nap upstairs. Snow is falling outside and there is something particularly quiet about snow falling. Like it knows it's so beautiful that it wants to sneak up on you so that when you look outside, you are wonderstruck.
Life appears to be normal. But the thing is, it's not. Earlier this week, my beautiful cousin took her own life. After struggling with addiction and more, she made a choice that has left us all in pieces. We break for her that we could not have done more. We break for her parents who are dealing with the unfathomable: the loss of a child. We break for her brothers and sister, her friends and for all those grappling with the same kind of pain she must have felt.
What strikes me this Saturday morning is that the world is continuing on. That even though this horrific thing has happened - this abrupt ending - it's business as usual for Mother Nature and all her friends. Why doesn't the world stop when we lose someone we love? Our lived experience in times like these is that everything halts: the dirty dishes remain in the sink, the work gets put on hold, the trips cut short. But that's just one tiny little corner of one tiny little block of this very big world. The truth is, everything continues on. And it feels cruel.
Jonathan Larson, in his musical Rent, writes about this in the song, "Without You":

Without you

The ground thaws

The rain falls

The grass grows

Without you

The seeds root

The flowers bloom

The children play

The stars gleam

The poets dream

The eagles fly

Without you

The earth turns

The sun burns

But I die without you

When something as horrible as this happens, it feels like the world should stop. Because a beautiful soul was lost and a family wounded beyond repair. Why doesn't the world around us recognize this? Why doesn't it feel the loss as its own and, at the very least, pause in acknowledgement.

Upstairs, my daughter is beginning to wake (did she even sleep?). She lets me know this by jumping in her crib and squealing for joy. She'll need to be changed and fed. And soon, my toddler will return home from swim with lots of stories to tell. And so I will change and feed, greet and listen. Because the world keeps going on without you. And I'm so sorry and so sad it's going on without you, Marigene. It was better with you in it. We love you and we miss you. And we wish there was something we could have done to have kept you here with us. 

The snow continues to fall and the roads are getting messy. The plows will come soon and my husband will need to shovel the driveway. I'll be inside, hoping and praying that returning to the goings on of this world will eventually heal us. I'm certain some answers lie in my daughters, whose goings ons are the work of my day. For that I am grateful.