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Don’t feel compelled to spend days or even hours crafting the perfect response. Write, sketch, paint, or compose your response in words or colors, musical notes or dance interpretations, and then share it with the world, in all its raw beauty. 

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Writing Prompt #3: Write, reflect, or create an original work about a time when the sound of silence was deafening.

My Response: 

My first thought is, most immediately, the late afternoon hours on September 11, 2001, when no planes filled the air and the roads were empty – a world stunned into silence as we all collectively held our breaths.

That was a deafening silence that we all felt, though. Anybody who was old enough on that day to hear the sorrowful sounds of silence will never forget it.

Personally, however, all I can think about right now is a sound that my generation is hearing all too often: the deafening silence that follows the news of the passing of a loved one.

The news is shared, but the words begin to drop off, as if falling from a cliff, word by word, into some void where they are enveloped – smothered – in a dark and heavy fog. And in those seconds that follow, when the final words fall into that abyss, we all feel the deafening silence of sorrow that weighs so heavily on our hearts. We don’t know what to say, even if we really could or remembered how to. Are there any words that could ever fill that space?

The sound of the weight, like some kind of jet engine on overdrive, courses through your veins, inflating them with fear, dread, grief.

Deafening.

Invariably, though, despite the heavy silence that lingers longer than we can comprehend, it is what rises from that deep, heavy fog:

Shared memories, laughter, that last smile or embrace that held there in the light, a lingering moment treasured for reasons we could not yet understand.

But now we do. Now we hold tightly to that lingering moment.

Yes. We are beginning to know that deafening silence too, too much. But we also find new comfort in these memories that fill the silence with sounds that imprint our hearts forever with what we will remember, hold dearly close, until our own last hours on this earth.