Bear witness with me.

I can't take the emails anymore. I can't look at another dead Iraqi baby in the arms of a US soldier, can't handle the videos of the sobbing widow hunched over her husband's casket, can't look at one more image of a house turned to rubble, bloodied children standing outside of it with looks of horror and fear on their faces.

I just can't take it. Pictures, like this one, send me into a spiral of despair and anger and terrible fear that this atrocity is happening and there is no apparent end to it in sight. How can this be happening? For the love of God, how can this be happening?

Every time I get an email forwarded to me with subject lines like, "Support our Troops! Watch This Video and Pass it On," I am filled with dread and my first instinct is to delete it. I don't want to spend the rest of my night in a dark cloud of despair. I don't want to be huddled over as waves of nausea and panic crash over my body. I don't want to see the Iraqi mother holding her dead child and be suddenly and terrifyingly transported into her world where it is me holding a lifeless Jack. But it is too late. In an instant, I am experiencing her horror and disbelief, her rage and fear, her sorrow and devastating grief. I feel it instantly, knowing that the grief of losing a child, in Iraq or in America, is exactly the same.

It's because of her, and the thousands like her, that I open the emails and watch the videos. I watch to grieve with her, to honor the love that she had for the child that was here for so little time, to witness the loss of that which was the most valuable thing she had. I watch to honor the life that someone else didn't in the hopes that somehow this will ease the loss for her. I watch so that I can say to her, "I see your son. He was here and now he is gone. He was the most beautiful thing to ever grace this planet. I loved him, too." I watch to mourn with her because it is all I know to do.

I love you. I am with you. Peace. Be still.