It's been a difficult four days on Friday morning a very close friend and member of our community

Laren woke up early, baked some scones for her boyfriend, rode her bike to work and was killed by a car, run over, and she was 34.

So these kinds of events not only are extremely painful in terms of the attachment that I had to Lorem as a friend, somebody that I saw regularly,

but also the sheer random violence of it has its own additional psychological attendant pains.

When we think of death these days, perhaps due to books like how we die, which presents

understandably the modern contemporary death is something that happens over a period of time a

gradual demise from progressive diseases aging Alzheimer's cancer, the life cut abruptly, violently off mid-sentence.

It can feel like a kind of mistake or something that's utterly foreign.

Most of us don't visualize that kind of death for ourselves,

the idea that we could wake up one morning, brush our teeth, make our breakfast, and then head out for a

regular commute, simply have a driver not take long enough to look before they turn and that will be it.

If she had left for her job 10 seconds earlier or 10 seconds later,

she would still be alive.

We do not live in a logical universe.

If we did, she would have outlived me by 20 years because I'm 20 years older.

Now the Darma that the Buddha presented warns us again and again and again that this is the nature of life that we have not only no guarantees but as the Buddha said in the first noble truth, life is a series of interrupted mourning and grieving where there is going to be a progression of old age or sickness old age death.

Loreen didn't even get those first two and there will be separation from people we love.

Now, I think the reason why the Buddha presents this is not to try to encourage a kind of pessimism but actually because we are so inclined to not want to

look at the truth and not want to accept our fragility and not want to acknowledge that we have absolutely no guarantee.

When we recognize how little surety we have it calls to attention not just how fragile those

important essential connections are that make us feel safe that we take

for granted those people that we rely on.

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