There are some things that you can find no words for.

You hear about something or someone or someplace, and you wish there was some way to express the trillion and one thoughts that immediately flood your head. There are so many that it feels like your brain will explode. Then the migraine aura — a.k.a. “the twinklies,” as I fondly (not really) refer to them — begins.

You wonder whether your head will stop spinning and if, someday (hopefully soon), you’ll be able to articulate everything that you feel wants to bubble up from inside.

Sometimes the feeling can be so numbing that even as you try to go about your business — listening to this song or that song, watching this TV show or that TV show, tackling this project or that — your brain feels incapable of forming ANY thoughts…about the song, about the TV show, about the project, about that thing that’s left you feeling a bit frozen.

You know they’re there, but the thoughts aren’t even half-baked. They’re still raw. They’re blobs of doughy emotion that will take shape in time…but not now, not just yet.

You wonder about the people most directly impacted, the people that play supporting roles in an unbelievable, unfathomable script. You wonder things like whether this was all His plan, what good will come from it, when that good will come, and if healing will ever begin. You wonder. And then you wonder some more.

And while those thoughts are taking shape, sometimes all you can do is turn your eyes back toward the people in those supporting roles and be there for them. To listen to them, to find your way with them, to empathize with them as best you can. Because if the healing can start anywhere, maybe it can start with a person.

And maybe that person can be me.

Tonight I am thankful to be able to do what I can, even though right now it doesn’t feel like much. I’ve been given ears that listen, a shoulders on which one can lean, and plenty of past experiences to draw from. And if those situations in the past only ever exist to help those in the present, then for them I am grateful.