Death

Last week my neighbor was killed by a suicide bomber in Afghanistan. Corey Dodge worked as an independent contractor helping to train their police and military for eight years and was coming home in October for good. He had a job lined up with the Maine State Police. Before he went to Afghanistan he had been a police officer and apparently very good at his job. He was 40. He has four children.

His funeral was emotionally charged and very sad. Everyone was crying, even the police officers that lined the walls of the Church. The Chaplain for the State Police gave the message, and one of his former Captains spoke, His mother sang. That blew my mind. I have sung at the funerals of my father, my stepmother and my stepfather and it was not at all difficult because I knew they were in heaven and that I would one day see them again. Corey's mother is a Christian woman and maybe that's how she got through it, but no one said whether Corey was saved or not. Maybe that's why the service was so sad; no one knew.

Maybe it was so sad because he was only 40 and he and his wife were so in love you could see it in their faces in every picture of them. Maybe because their youngest child will most likely have no memories of his father, or that he won't have the honor of walking his daughters down the aisle. Maybe because it is just so senseless. He was making a difference in the lives of many people in Afghanistan, believing it was his calling to serve and protect.

Death is just sad.