The death of a child of any age is an unspeakable grief for a parent. Death is a change that upends our wishes. What I desire one way or another does not effect the circumstance or the timing of the death of those dearest to me.

Alex Pretti was murdered a few days ago in Minneapolis. According to many video accounts his life was terminated by thoughtless reflex of the Federal ICE officers who surrounded him while he was in their custody.

The quotation from the Taoist text is meant as a nudge towards a particular manner of grieving.

     Alex Pretti and Renee Good will be remembered for a long time.

When Zhuangzi’s wife died,
Huizi went to console him and found him sitting on the ground,
drumming on the basin and singing.

Huizi said, “When a wife has lived with her husband
and raised the children, then dies in her old age,
not to mourn is already enough.
But to drum on a basin and sing
—is this not going too far?”

Zhuangzi replied, “Not really.
When she died, do you think that it was possible for me
not to grieve as everyone else?
I pondered on the beginning of her existence,
before she was born, when she had no life,
and before that no bodily form
and before that no breath.
From the conjunction of the indeterminate
and the imperceptible there arose a transforming power
and there was breath;
this led to the bodily form
and there emerged birth and life.

There was then a further transformation
and she is dead.

These processes, like the cycle of the four seasons,
follow one another.
and now there she lies,
sleeping in the great chamber between heaven and earth.

If I were to mourn and grieve,
it would indicate a failure to understand
what is inevitable.
Therefore I restrained myself!”

Zhuangzi, trans. by Hyunn Höchsmann and Yang Guorong, Book 17 Highest Happiness

This song seems apt for this circumstance, Get together by The Youngbloods. “Just one key unlocks them both.”