Wandering Along the Path: Right Speech

I finished a book yesterday that is a mystery, but much more: "The Familiar Dark" by Amy Engel. Set in the Ozarks, where my mother's family is from and still mostly resides, the poverty and misogyny is deeply familiar to me. But the theme of a mother who's twelve year old daughter is murdered echoes with my loss of my grown daughter. The mother can't rest until she finds the murderer, and she is hollowed out and all rage. But when she does discover and punish the murderer, of course it heals nothing. She is still alone with her unbearable emptiness. After I finished the last page I wept and wept. I feel a wall between me and the rest of the world, because I have this loss but there is nothing to say. There's no going backward, so there's no fixing it. Engel writes beatifully, and she portrays a world stacked against women. My daughter would have loved the book, and identified with the rage. I KNOW I'm not different from millions of people who lose loved ones, so theorectically I am not alone. But grief makes you FEEL alone. I know the sources of my daughter's anger as well, but it doesn't help me accept the suffering she experienced. It was just so unfair, and now her daughter has a loss that will never be erased. Women have to fight for the right to feel safe, yet we never entirely are, and that truth lives in our bodies. I hope women rise up to protect each other from violence and prejudice and lack of opportunities. But it will take more than what is currently happening. I'm deeply sad about that fact.