[daveT]

It's tough. It interesting how deaths can change your perspective for a short period of time, but in the end we all just end up bieng human, you know.

As for me, I have become quite numb to death. I stopped counting funerals at 14, though I have not been to one in quite a while now, but that probably has more to with the fact that I left my home town (read: unhealthy, alcoholic, violent, ghetto, where deaths are quite common). However the last time I saw a dead body was very shocking to me. I happened apon a dead body on the side walk in Key West. It does make a difference when you left home to leave that behind, and you find some dude with his brians splattered across the sidewalk. There is a huge difference between seeing a person in a casket made up to look better than they did in life, and the raw reality of death. I came to paradise to see this?

I think that the most shocking deaths are the ones where the person is 18 or 19 and has a sudden death. One person I know of and only talked to once in a while dies of drug OD. She was 18. It is really effed up to think that many of these deaths result in having to deal with the stress of leaving home and exploring new-found freedom. These people really lived through the worst of it, and had a life to look forward to. I knew two people who commited suicide while they were teenagers and one who died of cancer. But whatever, I have a laudry list of deaths. I think that these are the most shocking age. Infants are a strange breed to, but I don't find their deaths as shocking.

As for your acquaintance. I guess all that can be done is to hope for the best for his family, perhaps pitching in to help once in a while. It is a sticky situation the mother is in. She is either here in the States living in poverty, or she can go back to Mexico and live in poverty. It is terrible, but in a few months you will end up going back to human.