Human beings are so prone to irrational thought.  I woke up at 4 this morning, unable to sleep because I'm worried about my nephew.  Since yesterday morning I've been dealing with an irrational thought that has pestered me for many years. I spoke of it, vaguely in THIS POST in the VIP members' forum.  Sorry, non-VIP people.  It was a bit private   

I finally figured out why I'm so "sure" that if my nephew joins the army he'll be killed.  I think a part of me believes he'll die young regardless.  The reason is I believe his mother's family is cursed.

Of course it makes no sense.  But it's hard to argue against emotional responses.  Even after I rejected Christianity, a part of me continued to believe in hell.  It's hard to get the heart and head to agree, sometimes.

(Another example is karma.  I believe in it, but only if I do something nasty and deserve to be taken down a peg.  My half-baked "belief" in karma is probably good for the people around me.    I've only consciously tried revenge once and it didn't work for me, mostly because I hated myself for stooping so low.)

Back to the family curse.

There are people who believe the Kennedys are cursed.  They've certainly had their share of tragedy, but I'm pretty sure my ex-sister-in-law's family could give them a run for their money.

Many years ago when I was still in college, my (then) sister-in-law's brother was killed by a shotgun blast to the head.  There was some discussion as to whether it was an accident or a suicide made to look like an accident.  He was retrieving a shotgun from the back seat when the trigger caught on the seat springs (or something else back there) and blew his brains out. 

Within a few months his widow committed suicide, leaving three children.  Let's call them Frank, Bill and Cathy.  Cathy was only two years old at the time.  The older kids were quite traumatized, as I'm sure you can imagine.

A few months after that, my sister-in-law lost her first child at birth.  That was one of the "last-straw" incidents that led to my loss of faith.

Day before yesterday, "Cathy," now twenty years old, was driving near a landmark known as "lover's leap" when a car tried to pass a truck on a blind curve and hit her head on.  She's brain-dead and on life support...or maybe they've taken her off by now.  Her grandfather (my ex-sister-in-law's father) lived for many years after a heart transplant, so she understood the importance of being an organ donor.  The doctors will harvest her organs today.  The funeral will be on Wednesday.

My nephew and Cathy were very close, more like siblings than cousins.  The kid is really broken up and so am I.  Due to acrimony between my ex-sister-in-law's family and our family, I'd only seen Cathy once since she was a toddler.  I'm concerned about my nephew.  I'm worried about his emotional reaction to this tragedy and I'm worried about him because of the weird-ass, totally illogical idea of family curses. 

I need to go see the kid today.  Usually we play video games or at least talk about them but when I've gone through periods of grief due to a death, the casual violence in games bothered me.  When I was a kid, my cousin lost her best friend to a gunshot wound.  The girl's little brother accidentally shot her. (Odd that my family still insists that you're more likely to kill an intruder than yourself or a member of the household.  I know several people that died the latter way and no one who shot or killed an intruder.)  Anyway, I couldn't understand why my cousin wasn't interested in shooting BB guns.  What can I say?  I was a kid and I was thick as a brick in some ways.

Also, as an atheist, I believe that when you die, you die.  That's it.  Cathy is beyond pain, but I know her family will comfort themselves with the totally unfounded idea they will see her again in heaven.  The only words of comfort I can offer my nephew are words of commiseration.  I can't undo what has happened. 

I'm hoping that sharing my irrational thoughts will break some of the power they hold over me.  I'm also hoping that somehow I can gather the wisdom to know what to do to help my nephew.

Wish me luck.  Okay, I don't believe in that, either, but you know what I mean.