Imagine for a moment. It's not ending for everybody at once. But just for you and your family now, the ever-present now, in small and large ways. Or so it seems, confined to my finite mind. Locked in here. I've been thinking about this a lot lately, because it happened to my family almost seven years ago when my nephew Billy (age 12) was hit by a car on the road in front of his house, sustaining fatal head injuries, resulting in his death. He lived long enough for the doctors to harvest his corneas and kidneys from his life-support sustained body.
That would be enough, I suppose, if it weren't for the aftermath... My sister Shari, Billy's mom, went into a seven-year tailspin. I not only lost my nephew, but I lost my closest friend, my sister, Billy's mom. She's still rocking and rolling, in most part because of his catastrophic death, and in so many ways is inexorably changed and no longer able to "be" with me.
I know this happens all over the Happy Planet -- The human condition... HUA! (tip of the hat to sen. bob) People die. Children die in untimely and horrible ways, but I have only my overlook. I'm here. And it's here and now still in our family. It's always in my face and it's hitting me hard in the last few days. My children are 27 and 32. They were very young adults when Billy died. But, you know, before then I had never thought a lot about them dying young... before that morning in 1998. Funny that, because most of the job of mothers and fathers on our big blue marble is to keep our offspring alive until they are old enough to go off on their own. It's been that way since the beginning of human civilization... keeping the offspring safe to grow to maturity. The thought is just a bit shaded... I'm guessing none of us thinks that to be our job.
And the rest of the world goes on, despite our private pains (and so it goes, and so it goes). Suppose you're someone who has actually embraced the absurdity of it all. Camus, Sisyphus and all. And suppose you're a blogger ... and you hope for yourself to be connected enough to post timely and pithy threads. Imagine that sometimes it all becomes just too much, the family lovelies, and the lovelies on-line. What's a blogger to do?
This blogger thinks all the time about those left after a bombing run in Iraq. She thinks about what happens after the tide goes away post-tsunami. I think about the US military personnel who didn't know what sort of pain they'd leave behind if they died defending some greedy rapacious rulers' notions of how things should wrongly be on the Happy Planet.
It's my day off. I've been awake since 4 AM my time. Too much time to think and feel. Sleep would be better if I could manage it. Blogging about it works, though. Even when in emotionally feverished and grammatically impoverished places I know that I am part of something "huger". It's all an intricate web, after all. I keep looking for more clarity. The seeking of clarity is much of what I love about being at ASZ.
For what it's worth. Kahlil Gibran: "I would that my life remain a tear and a smile".
