AS WE rejoice in our relief and revel in our rage, let's remember:

For some of us, it will never end.

The siege of the sniper is over, and we're liberated from terror - but 13 grieving families of the dead and wounded are exiled from our euphoria.

Yesterday, a huge stone house on a leafy Germantown street looked welcoming beneath the tall trees. On Oct. 11, Kenneth Bridges was returning to the embrace of this warm homestead with the blue shutters on the windows, when an unthinkable fate left him dead.

And yesterday, the family inside was continuing the heroic legacy of his life.

The family was headed to the national convention of MATAH, the organization Bridges cofounded to encourage African-Americans to buy from black-owned businesses.

"We're going away," his daughter explained, declining to talk about the arrest of her father's alleged killers.

Bridges' life was writ large in dedication to an ideal. But he and the other sniper victims died, not on some battlefield in defense of a dream, but in pursuit of the mundane.

How ironic that we carefully measure life's significant decisions for their life-altering influence, when it's the meaningless choices we make every day that sealed the victims' fate.

Kenneth Bridges decided to stop for gasoline on his way home from a MATAH meeting in Washington.

James Martin stopped to buy snacks for his son's church youth group. James Buchanan mowed the grass at an auto dealership. Linda Franklin loaded packages from Home Depot in her car after shopping for her new home.

In that way, the Tarot card left by the sniper was not inaccurate when it said "I am God." These random murders were as enigmatic as acts of God, diverting destinies and altering fates with no reason and no explanation.

And leaving us with no way for us to distance ourselves, no way to stem our spiraling anxiety.

Now, those of us who've escaped unscathed will regain our equilibrium. We have our explanation: An embittered ex-soldier who justified his sick rage by donning a cloak of religious resentment allegedly struck in the name of Islam with a kid as his psycho sidekick.

But the families of the victims are left with bigger questions that seem to have no answers. Why their loved ones?

"Everybody understands that life is a crapshoot," the father of a 25-year-old nanny who was gunned down while vacuuming out her minivan told the Chicago Tribune.

"You know this. But to come to that realization and accept it is another thing. It takes a concious will that I don't know how you find."

"I believe in God," said the daughter of a taxi driver who was the sniper's third victim.

"But I can't stop questioning Him: Why did it have to be my dad?"

So as we rejoice in our relief and revel in our rage, let's remember.

For some of us, it will never end.