Just wondering

I was thinking today about that story about the woman who buried all her children in the frozen ground, on her way to Austria, was it, in the winter during WW II? With a tea spoon. she buried them. She had a little wagon and a tea spoon. And she lost everything – except her own life. She got to keep that.
I hate that story. Hearing stories like that, especially when they are true, doesn’t make me feel better about my own lot. It just makes me wonder what other things are happening even as we speak – unconscionable things, terrible things, grievous things. And it makes we worry about what could happen, even to us now. To me. To my children. Tells me I can’t trust my life, which I always know but sometimes forget. It also leaves me feeling helpless to act. I didn’t know the teaspoon lady. I don’t know how she did what she did. Am I supposed to be ashamed that I haven’t had to deal with anything requiring so much courage, or at least stubborn doggedness in the face of what cannot be believed, even as it is lived? Because I’m pretty already filled up on shame of that kind.
Then I wondered this: is there a point where the sorrow, the dis-couragement, is the same in all of us? Whether this or that story seems silly to somebody else, shallow when compared to frozen teaspoons and lost children, is it possible that a woman in these times, living in a decent house, even in relatively wondrous conditions, can sometimes sink to the bottom of the sea and lie there, quiet and emptied and deeply sad? The heart limp and tired. Hope folded carefully up – maybe for just a little moment – and placed gently in a drawer?
Can such a woman, with her full kitchen and healthy family members, feel the same numbness as the woman with the teaspoon, even though her snow and cold and tiny deaths are invisible to everybody else? Or are there depths that such women can never know?
I don’t know how to answer this. I know all the “shoulds.” I’m just kind of talking about what happens to people regardless of what “should” be, sometimes.