my pen stopped today

The pen is the pulse of a journalist's thoughts, the mind's object of affection where thoughts flow and turn to prose on paper.

Today, my pen stopped.

Often I am able to suppress my emotions and remain focused. It's not that I don't have a heart, it is that I am a survivor. I continue to survive through difficult situations and ignore the way I feel to move toward a more important cause. Today, I couldn't allow myself to do that. As I learned about a professor's husband who is in the ICU after surviving the Metrolink crash Friday, I had to put my pen down. This distant tragedy was no longer distant, but close to home and to my heart. It was close to my pulse, which had to stop. I didn't allow tears to flow, although I wanted to, but as I read the news stories and gathered information about the professor, I broke out into hives.

I realized since I wasn't allowing myself to react, my body was going to without my permission. It may have been stress or simply the saddening feeling of someone in pain, I'm not sure. I eventually picked my pen up again, but it made me wonder why I had such a hard time doing so. When does the pen turn from a warm heart of telling a person's story to a cold shoulder towards emotion? Or, out of respect, should I tell the story at all? This doesn't apply to the nature of this story alone, but it made me wonder today.

Please pray for the professor, her husband and their three children.