The Suburbs

I came upon this rather distressing shrine just down the block from my youngest boy’s condo in Rialto, California.

It isn’t too often I see descanso setups in the plain sight of suburbia. Typically speaking, Americans don’t like being reminded of death and tragedy around their home base grounds. That’s why we often shunt cemeteries to the edge of town, and it’s why most descansos are erected along the highways rather than side streets.

But it’s obvious why this one took root and its neighborhood ran with it. It was commemorating a recent incident. More awfully, it was honoring the losses of what appears to be two excruciatingly young children named Nevaeh and Alinah.

There was a crosswalk nearby. I’m guessing a pair of little ones were crossing the street and were struck by a passing driver, somehow, someway. Or they were both in the same car accident. I don’t know. I could look up the incident, but today, I don’t feel like tracking down the personal statistics of such an event. You’ll pardon me, I’m sure.

It was, as always when I discover descansos commemorating children, utterly heartbreaking. It was also paradoxical, in absorbing the site’s imprinted sadness yet being simultaneously impressed with the outpouring of support and love. I don’t think I’ve ever seen this many stuffies at a memorial site.

This array probably takes the cake in terms of number of candles, second only in my wanderlusting lexicon to Kobe Bryant’s huge shrine outside the Lakers’ hometown arena in downtown Los Angeles way back in early 2020. Both this suburban shrine and Kobe’s mourning site had the advantage of a widespread community contributing to its components, rather than a freeway-adjacent memorial usually constructed from one particular set of family or friends. The rows of veladoras, or Seven Day candles, were striking in the midday sunlight. The coup de gras is of course the photos of the two children front and center. It is always maddening to consider how many of our young ones perish long before they grow up to have lives of their own.

Absolutely maddening.

If you think, upon leaving my mortal coil behind, I’m going to roll over and embrace the All-Oneness without giving a little guff to the higher-ups beforehand, when I tell them in no uncertain terms the fairness scale here on Terra Firma seems wildly askew, you’d be mistaken. Egocentric though it may be, I still have plenty of notes for the upper spheres, most of them concerning a dead-heat race between unnecessary deaths of our children and the genetic tides and fortunes and unfortunes that randomly dictate which of our children end up bearing heavier burdens like developmental disabilities.

Yeah, yeah, I know…that stuff is on us, we ought to have advanced our measures of stewardship, our medical science, our empathy and concern for others. It’s true. It’s all on us. I understand we’re choosing to burn resources on nuclear weapon defense budgets and continued fossil fuel corporate profits, and those resources might better serve the greater good in being applied to cancer research and prenatal care and skilled nursing and the poor and the unhoused and all the rest of our society’s ailments.

That doesn’t mean lending a helping hand ought to be outright forbidden, even in these lowly primordial dimensions like ours, especially in the face of seeing a chosen few shaping the lives of generations of humans.

Me, if I’m an upper sphere resident of all knowing, all loving energy, I might maybe wanna give a little nudge here and there, help those poor little simian lifeforms along a bit. They can lecture me until they’re blue in the face about the necessary nature of sapient evolution and how it all has to happen as it must. They’re going to have a tough time convincing me young children perishing prematurely are a necessary part of the bigger picture.

Oh yes. I have notes.

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