Paging John Burroughs

I thought that after the garden tour, things would quiet down here. I was wrong. Last week we got word that the daughter of friends of our was murdered by her husband of only a few months. I will spare everyone the gruesome details, but suffice it to say that the circumstances were disturbing at best. She was soon to be 29 years old; a lovely girl, a brilliant biomedical researcher at an Ivy League school, working on stem cell research for cancer. Her family is totally devastated - they had known the young man for several years, and neither they, nor his parents, nor anyone who knows him saw anything like this lurking within him. Speaking for myself, I'm completely in turmoil. How could someone suddenly snap like that, and wreak absolute, evil destruction on so many hearts? A part of me clings to the hope that a phone call will say that it was all a terrible mistake, and she's OK. Yet she's gone, and the rational part of my brain knows that. And when it gets to be too enormous to think of, I'm reminded of the naturalist John Burroughs who said, "I go to nature to be soothed and healed, and to have my senses put in order." Well, it's a noble sentiment, and I'm trying mightily to find that soothing and healing - but at the moment, I'm not having much success.