A note before this starts:
This whole thing deals directly with the personal tragedies of people I don't know -- and I do not feel good at all about invoking them. I think all of the language I know is inadequate to address their losses and discussing any details of them will, against every endeavor, seem to trivialize their ordeal. My fear is sounding like I'm complaining about a paper cut while surrounded by people who are having their arms pulled off. Also, I'm not fact-checking anything.
The title of this essay comes from the Yehuda HaLevi poem "‘Tis a fearful thing." I'm a latecomer to the poem in its entirety, but its opening statement, "‘Tis a fearful thing to love what death can touch," has persisted so long and earnestly in my consciousness that I once told someone that I considered it to be sort of my personal "yabba-dabba-doo."
This weekend, amid inescapable reflection and meditations on the attacks of 9/11, we had a two hour period that sort of brought a lot of things into focus.
My wife got a call that someone she knew had a house fire, and that it was bad. We would eventually learn that, as bad as it was (the whole house is destroyed) the parent who was home was in the basement for a couple of minutes when the fire started and, well, you've seen the prevention films so you don't need the obvious reminders of what unchecked fires present in terms of deadly potential. But the neighbors did what we all hope neighbors do and everyone got out.
Then there was another phone call asking if any of us knew this girl, a former student at my kids' school who had lost her life in an accident the night before, and we didn't, but my daughter knew the name. It's always sad to hear about a young person dying.
Later, we got word that a student's mother had died in the same accident. My daughter knows him, her boyfriend knows him, so now there was this starker context. They were going to see someone affected by this event.
Then, we found out that the third person killed that night sat next to my daughter in English class. And suddenly this was all very different.
My reaction, which is the only thing I can really talk about responsibly, was the feeling that I had almost lost my daughter. And that is... stupid. Because I hadn't. Even I, the person who most frequently misinterprets the way that I respond to things, can see that this is irrational.
Unless you back the camera up a bit and consider how arbitrary it all is. An axle broke, a truck crossed a divider and three people, who were neither five hundred feet beyond nor behind where they were at that exact moment, did not live to see the moment after that. A father in a fairly new house left a room at exactly the wrong moment and didn't hear a fairly new HVAC unit spark and ignite but because of his neighbors he gets to be awoken at another sunrise by his kids climbing on his head. People who missed one of a handful of planes or called in sick to work at some specific offices on September 11, 2001 got to stay here with us and dance between the raindrops for at least a little while more.
I hadn't come close to losing anyone I love in that particular accident, but that's as far as I can stretch the idea because we're all citizens of the same indifferent machine.
It's the fact that these things happened this weekend, which is virtually a federally recognized, tomorrow-is-promised-to-no-one themed period of national reflection, that has tripped me up. I gladly accept the gentle, well-intended mandate of appreciating the people in my life while I can. But what does that really mean? Because when I do it, I just imagine my loved ones lying in various forms of wreckage.
And that can't be the idea behind it all. Cherishing the people in your life can't be about spending your short and precious time together imagining, in as much crippling detail as possible, what it would/will be like to grieve over them. It could be that I'm just doing it wrong -- that I have some faulty A/B switch in my head that can't keep those two ideas discrete. At the same time, I'm afraid not to at least try in case imagining these things turns out to be some practicable and indispensable psychological defense mechanism.
It feels like all of this is just safeguarding against the inevitable reaction of punishing ourselves for taking people for granted, which always seems to be the first thing the bereaved feel once we start feeling things again. But we're not cherishing those moments of worry when we're indulging our fearful imaginations. We return to the scarce moments when everyone we love seemed to be beyond the reach of death and our happiness felt audacious and eternal. Saying this doesn't feel right in any way, but taking the people we love for granted might be an enormous privilege.
When these terrible moments come, we shouldn't regret or punish ourselves for the time we've spent ignoring the impermanence of life because it's only then that we're living the moments we'll want to return to -- when the wind is still warm and we could still look into each other's bright and tearless eyes.
This whole thing deals directly with the personal tragedies of people I don't know -- and I do not feel good at all about invoking them. I think all of the language I know is inadequate to address their losses and discussing any details of them will, against every endeavor, seem to trivialize their ordeal. My fear is sounding like I'm complaining about a paper cut while surrounded by people who are having their arms pulled off. Also, I'm not fact-checking anything.
The title of this essay comes from the Yehuda HaLevi poem "‘Tis a fearful thing." I'm a latecomer to the poem in its entirety, but its opening statement, "‘Tis a fearful thing to love what death can touch," has persisted so long and earnestly in my consciousness that I once told someone that I considered it to be sort of my personal "yabba-dabba-doo."
This weekend, amid inescapable reflection and meditations on the attacks of 9/11, we had a two hour period that sort of brought a lot of things into focus.
My wife got a call that someone she knew had a house fire, and that it was bad. We would eventually learn that, as bad as it was (the whole house is destroyed) the parent who was home was in the basement for a couple of minutes when the fire started and, well, you've seen the prevention films so you don't need the obvious reminders of what unchecked fires present in terms of deadly potential. But the neighbors did what we all hope neighbors do and everyone got out.
Then there was another phone call asking if any of us knew this girl, a former student at my kids' school who had lost her life in an accident the night before, and we didn't, but my daughter knew the name. It's always sad to hear about a young person dying.
Later, we got word that a student's mother had died in the same accident. My daughter knows him, her boyfriend knows him, so now there was this starker context. They were going to see someone affected by this event.
Then, we found out that the third person killed that night sat next to my daughter in English class. And suddenly this was all very different.
My reaction, which is the only thing I can really talk about responsibly, was the feeling that I had almost lost my daughter. And that is... stupid. Because I hadn't. Even I, the person who most frequently misinterprets the way that I respond to things, can see that this is irrational.
Unless you back the camera up a bit and consider how arbitrary it all is. An axle broke, a truck crossed a divider and three people, who were neither five hundred feet beyond nor behind where they were at that exact moment, did not live to see the moment after that. A father in a fairly new house left a room at exactly the wrong moment and didn't hear a fairly new HVAC unit spark and ignite but because of his neighbors he gets to be awoken at another sunrise by his kids climbing on his head. People who missed one of a handful of planes or called in sick to work at some specific offices on September 11, 2001 got to stay here with us and dance between the raindrops for at least a little while more.
I hadn't come close to losing anyone I love in that particular accident, but that's as far as I can stretch the idea because we're all citizens of the same indifferent machine.
It's the fact that these things happened this weekend, which is virtually a federally recognized, tomorrow-is-promised-to-no-one themed period of national reflection, that has tripped me up. I gladly accept the gentle, well-intended mandate of appreciating the people in my life while I can. But what does that really mean? Because when I do it, I just imagine my loved ones lying in various forms of wreckage.
And that can't be the idea behind it all. Cherishing the people in your life can't be about spending your short and precious time together imagining, in as much crippling detail as possible, what it would/will be like to grieve over them. It could be that I'm just doing it wrong -- that I have some faulty A/B switch in my head that can't keep those two ideas discrete. At the same time, I'm afraid not to at least try in case imagining these things turns out to be some practicable and indispensable psychological defense mechanism.
It feels like all of this is just safeguarding against the inevitable reaction of punishing ourselves for taking people for granted, which always seems to be the first thing the bereaved feel once we start feeling things again. But we're not cherishing those moments of worry when we're indulging our fearful imaginations. We return to the scarce moments when everyone we love seemed to be beyond the reach of death and our happiness felt audacious and eternal. Saying this doesn't feel right in any way, but taking the people we love for granted might be an enormous privilege.
When these terrible moments come, we shouldn't regret or punish ourselves for the time we've spent ignoring the impermanence of life because it's only then that we're living the moments we'll want to return to -- when the wind is still warm and we could still look into each other's bright and tearless eyes.
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