BUFFALO, N.Y. — At its simplest, the news is a daily log of life: who, and what, and where, and when, and how, and why.
One by one, days go by and stories are filed, the historical significance of which, typically, only time will reveal.
Today we know the who, the what, the where, the when, the how ... it's the easy part. We know it is a day Buffalo has already locked tight in its long memory.
It's the "why" that is a different story, a question for which words simply fail. While it may be answered by faith in one moment, and asked again and again and again in another, any answers always seem somehow insufficient, if they come at all.
Most of us are just learning who Jason Arno was: his story beginning and ending for us all at once. We know where he was when the call came, and what he was doing, and how he lost his life doing it.
We've learned where he grew up, and who he loved, and how he smiled when he got his picture taken for work.
But how much more there is to a life, and how our hearts, heavy as they are, go out to all those who will miss everything about him, all of those things that we will simply never know, the smallest things that absolutely define us to those who love us most:
From the sound of his laugh to how he walked in a room to just how it felt just to be around him. The stories he told, the smell of dishes he cooked, the way his face looked after a long day or when he finally fell asleep.
It is in counting those tiniest of things that we begin to understand the incalculable nature of loss.
As we, the news, record this day, these moments, as we try to tell this part of Jason Arno's story — honoring him, allowing a community to pay its last respects, support and pray for his family, friends and fellow firefighters — we do so with the knowledge that those closest to Jason Arno might want us to know that when it comes to the man he was, the light that he brought to this world and how empty it will now feel without him ...
We have no idea.