This is such a difficult Nugget to write.  I want, so very badly, to acknowledge the loss of these youngsters, but it's hard to find the words.  I feel a blankness in my heart, an absence of understanding.  I feel so sad, but numb too.  It's hard to imagine all these kids, one minute full of a future, the next minute dead.  What hell it must have been, that night in the club!

               

I know that some people cope with the grief by talking politics.  But watching the politicians trying to turn this to their advantage in the election makes me so angry.  So many issues are spinning off this one event, spinning us away from the focus on the massacre itself.  Of course, we do need to discuss gun control, very badly.  One of the many feelings that consumes me is the desire to do something so that this can never happen again.

               

But I don't want to talk politics.  I want to acknowledge that a terrible tragedy did occur, and we didn't prevent it, and these kids are gone forever, many more badly injured.  Over the next weeks I hope to hear of miraculous recoveries among the injured, but I am afraid we'll hear darker stories.  The poor families!  I saw an interview with a mother who was still waiting to find out if her son was alive, and she said that he'd recently been honored for his work on the gay-straight alliance.  Just a week ago, I would have said we were making marvelous strides at creating and living a more accepting society.  What a set-back this is.

               

I am straight (for the most part) but I have gay friends and relatives.  I've been to a couple gay clubs, keeping shy friends company as they started to explore their new world.  And these clubs are such wonderful places, full of people who are coming out of hiding, revealing their tender inner selves.  The atmosphere is so joyful.  There are some straight people there, friends or the bi-curious.  But we're a minority, and the main action of the club swirls around us, as though we were rocks in the stream.

              

I hate to think of one of these lively meeting places turned into a charnel house.  I am so sad for those people who were injured and killed, but also sad for all the gay youngsters, who may be afraid to gather in the aftermath of this horror.

               

A friend at work is the mother of a gay man in his early twenties, so she is feeling most keenly how close to home this could have been.  I expected her to be bitter and angry, but instead she is keeping her heart open for all the gay youngsters out in the world.  I said to her, somewhat bitterly, what can we do?  And she replied - "We can take care of each other.  That's the message I'm sharing with my kids."  What open-hearted wisdom!  I hope that most of us can see this as a call to greater tenderness with each other, in the face of a frightening world.