« book insanity | Main | recap of our vacation »
Saturday, February 07, 2004
the world is full of grief this week
I've mentioned before that I had a daughter who died when she was nine weeks old, of a congenital heart defect. When she was born I joined an online community of parents of children with CHDs. One woman in particular, I remember, mentioned a painting she'd seen and how it reflected her life on the day when she drove down a busy freeway and through a bustling city to a university hospital and found out that there was something very wrong with her yet-to-be-born son's heart; in the painting, a man was falling off a cliff in the background, while everyone else just went about their business like nothing was going on. When my daughter died I instantly remembered that painting, and the image has stuck with me ever since, of someone's life being drastically altered while everyone else just goes on unaffected by the events taking place. I remember driving to her funeral on a Friday afternoon, looking at the people in town -- women on their lunch breaks in business suits and tennis shoes walking around the block, kids on their way back to the high school, tourists -- and thinking, this is a day I will always remember with incredible sadness, and to them it's just another day. The word "surreal" doesn't really seem appropriate because it's used so lightly so often, but that's really what it was. And this past week I've found myself thinking of that painting again, with the shifted perspective that my own experience gave me years ago. I just got back from a week's vacation in Florida, visiting my best friend and her family. We had a marvelous time. But while we were obtaining boarding passes and going to the petting zoo and watching Phantom of the Opera and lounging around the house and going to Chick-Fil-A, and while the people we saw were just going about their ordinary business, and while the people back home and in between and everywhere around the world were just doing their normal first-week-of-February stuff, another close friend of mine, on the day before her thirty-first birthday, wrapped her son in his favorite blanket and held him as he gave up the ferocious struggle with cancer he's been engaged in for the last year and a half. Another mother, a total stranger to me, in a more public story, found out that her daughter had been kidnapped and then brutally murdered. A woman I've known since we were in junior high together lost her four-day-old daughter to SILT. If I don't carefully distance myself from these tragedies I will plummet into depression -- and yet I have that freedom, I can distance myself a little, just enough to go on about my normal life, with an undercurrent of grief. Those mothers can't do that. They can't set it aside or step away from it, it's right there with them, all around them, inside them. They will forever remember the first week of February 2004 as one racked with unbelievable pain, while I'll think of it as the week I took my first trip in an airplane, and while millions of people won't remember the week at all once it's been over for a while.
I remember when I was a little girl, maybe in second grade, I had this epiphany wherein I really actually realized that all the people I saw around me every day, the kids at school and teachers and parents and everyone else -- they were just as complicated on the inside as me. They had wants and thoughts, they had private lives and imaginations. And I was just overwhelmed (still am when I really let myself dwell on this) with the complexity of the world with all these souls in it. How full the world was of people, of individuals. And today all I could think of as I drove down the freeway coming home from the airport was: how many of these people are facing something they don't think they can face? How many are looking around at the people around them thinking for them it's just a normal day; how strange...? The world is just too full of grief this week. My prayers are so heavy.
