Two bodies in sleeping bags were found on the beach today.

Can anybody tell me what that sentence means? Because suddenly and unexpectedly that sentence is woven into the fabric of our lives. But it reads like a rosetta stone with no hope of translation.

The sentence appeared in Thursday’s San Francisco Chronicle, and it went on to probably link one of the bodies to a girl Lynn used to babysit; she was the daughter of the minister who married us, who performed the first (of many) resuscitations on my wife’s faith and hope. She was engaged to a boy who she had met at college and was working with at a camp and with whom, en route to visit friends, had disappeared last Friday.

And yesterday, maybe, probably, their bodies were found in sleeping bags on a beach at the foot of a great precipice. Their jeep was parked at the top of the bluff.

The story goes on to give some more details. It was Fish Beach in Sonoma County. Their Red Jeep was parked by Highway One. Their bodies were found when paramedics tried to rescue a local man who was trying to retrieve his girlfriend’s purse, and instead had fallen fifty feet. He had to be rescued by helicopter.

And these details seem so strange and so divorced from the sentence at the top of the story that I think, it may be (it must be!) because I’m not from the San Francisco area. If I lived there I would read this story and know. There would be some clue in that jumble that would explain it all.

“Oh!” I would say, “Fish Beach. Well, I’m surprised they even found the bodies…”

or maybe it would be “Sonoma County! No wonder they were in their sleeping bags…”

But I’m not from there, and neither is anyone else from my wife’s very small town or her very small church in the middle of Ohio, who call us and ask us to search the internet for these stories. We call them back and Lynn reads them the story.

But we don’t know how people that we knew (know?) become bodies in sleeping bags. How they leave their jeep? How they climb into their sleeping bags? How they die?

And I said to Lynn last night that it sheds a lot of light on why the show CSI is number one (and number two) rated right now.

These shows renew our faith in the scientific method and the power of rationality. If by careful investigation, if by deliberate inductive thinking, if by patient examination of figure and ground, we persist – we will come to solutions.

Crime and unexpected, unnatural death will no longer taunt us like riddles that point to the yawning chasm of sorrow and horror and pain that sits just at the border of life.

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Speaking of life:

We re-painted our living room. Linda Leon says it’s the color of her coffee after she puts creamer in.

When I was twenty four and shared an office with my friend Greg, he told me that people who put cream and sugar both in their coffee didn’t really like coffee. It made sense to me so I stopped putting sugar in my coffee. Ever since coffee with cream has been my favorite. In daylight the walls look like shiny caramel, but at night, only lit up from inside, it is like living in a perfect cup of coffee.

Linda and Celia and Jessica and Jenn and Marcia and Lynn and I painted the walls together. They laughed and worked faster and more efficiently than I imagined possible. We were done in a few hours.

And Jaelyn has been happy and dancing and telling me all the time how much she loves me. Do you know what a gift it is to have a child love you? Better yet, to tell you that she loves you. Her cheeks are roughly the same shade as our walls. And round as perfect tomatoes when she smiles.

Her favorite music to play is a Latin-Pop-Hits CD that we bought for a dollar on a whim at a grocery store. She plays it loud and dances with abandon. Whirling. Laughing. Giggling. Shaking her booty. Dancing and laughing and whirling here in our perfect coffee cup of a livingroom.

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But at the border of life:

Later in the day yesterday it was confirmed. The bodies are Lindsay’s and Jason’s. And they were shot in their sleep, says the police department.

On the beach. In their sleeping bags. Sleeping. Shot.

There are more calls back and forth from Coshocton. No one has made solid plans for memorial services yet. No one knows how Chris and Kathy are doing yet.

They flew to California on Monday because Lindsay always always calls on Sunday night. Even though she’s engaged to a boy who likes to wander to Thailand and Montana after working hard for a season in some other remote corner of the world. Even though she’d gone off (improbably for a Fresno, Ohio girl) for a summer to work in California. She always always called on Sunday nights.

Chris and Cathy always stand at the back of the small sanctuary that spills out into the gravel parking lot cut into one of the stunningly beautiful rolling hills that rise up and around the acres and acres of cornfields in every direction in little Fresno, Ohio.

Chris and Cathy always come to every wedding for the Leindecker cousins and the hog roasts in august and the hospital when someone is sick. And they grew up right here in the area, and after bible college came back to their home church and have poured everything in their life into little Fresno Bible Church which blocks the view of their Mobile Home from the County Road where cars whiz by through the corn fields and the beautiful rolling hills.

I’ve thought about how far and foreign and odd California was to Chris and Cathy as they waited before we knew anything.

Now.

I cannot imagine what it is like to be there.

Would I ever want to go to this cliff? This beach? Where your 22 year old daughter who you love to see laugh and be happy. Who you are amazed came from you and is now a person who is carefree and interesting and a fully formed self. Where she went to sleep, probably, hopefully, as happy as she’d ever been. With the love her life. Feeling free and wild on a beach. At the edge of America, and for you, at the very edge of any emotion you imagined you could ever have?

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My mother’s brother was shot in a hunting accident when he was fifteen years old. My grandpa Andy raced into the woods behind the gas station until he found his son who was already dead and carried him running to the ambulance that was waiting. My grandmother heard the ambulance racing by outside of the bowling alley where she was bowling with her team.

My grandpa and my grandma and my mother are some of the funnest, happiest people I know and I am amazed by this because I know that as soon as we start to talk about my Uncle Andy, who I am named for, all of them are crying like people who are still carrying him out of the woods and still hearing the telephone at the bowling alley ring.

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And it all makes me both afraid to love or live at all, but also:

Very desperate to love and live at full tilt.

Because…the sentences that end so much of our hope are always so unexpected, so jarringly meaningless, so final.