Shh, what was that your life was saying?

Here’s a phrase to ponder:

“a suicide bomber detonated in a crowded marketplace today”

The phrase strikes me as odd, because it wasn’t the bomb that detonated. It wasn’t that the bomber detonated the bomb. I have an image of a person with no explosive materials strapped to his body, walking into a crowd of people and just… Boom. I’m not trying to be funny here either. In order for a person to willingly kill oneself as a suicide bomber, to kill oneself while trying to takea bunch of other people along for the ride, well, it seems to me that such a person might actually have to detonate inside in some way.

I have to work on this one, and verify the phrasing of the article.

In a completely unrelated context, I heard the phrase “Let your life speak.” It was identified as a Quaker saying. I have pondered it all day, marvelling at the lovely simplicity of it. Wondering how my life speaks for me. Paired with the suicide bomber, the phrase is really rather different. When he detonated, was that his life speaking? Or was that his death speaking? Are they separate?

Did the boy in Omaha today detonate too, with a gun instead of a bomb?