My community experienced a tragedy last week. One of those moments that becomes a new milestone in life, a stake in the flow of time by which we date future events. Years from now, people will still talk about where they were when they heard the news.
I was sitting on my couch, checking my email after having returned from being officially received into the Episcopal Church. On the drive home, I'd been musing over whether to blog about that.
And then suddenly, nothing mattered except the tragedy.
Social media exploded, and the schedule filled with opportunities to gather with others in times of communal mourning and meditation.
My immune system took that moment to find another cold I had somehow missed in the last month. And not just any cold: fever, chills, sore throat, cough, laryngitis.
While my community walked together into grief, greeting casual acquaintances with hugs, I've felt honor bound to hold myself aloof.
I watched the embraces, the clasped hands, the kisses. Anytime someone
approached me, I warded them off, "I have a really bad cold."
This afternoon, I stood on hill beside a pond, feeling on my back the warmth of the sun breaking through the clouds, listened to eulogies for someone far too young, and watched parents face the unimaginable, surrounded by people who love them.
The service was four cough drops long.
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WhenI was in high school, a girl who was a couple years younger than me, and rode the same school bus as me, was killed in a car crash one weekend. I remember the shock of realizing how quickly her life was taken. It affected me, It wasn't until I was a mother, and learned of the deaths of classmates of my own children that I grieved in a different way, in a way that only a mother, or parent can know. Now as, a grandmother, I feel that desire to reach out to my children and grandchildren in their times of mourning, that time of feeling a loss, of what so quickly was nubbed out. I'm sorry that you have such an awful cold and had to keep yourself at a distance when more than ever you needed to hug and be hugged and be able to console your children.
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