I am struggling a little bit, just a little bit. A couple of tears slipped down my cheek when our church children’s choir sang Away in a Manger at our Lessons and Carols service this week. Afterwards our preacher read a stock prayer – dear Lord, be with the sick at heart. Dear Lord, comfort those who mourn. Dear Lord, walk with those in shadows. Dear Lord, carry we, your children, in your arms. My lower lip trembled through the whole thing, and I let more tears fall when he tacked onto to the very end “especially in Newtown Connecticut.” The hateful knowledge of that hateful day is following me everywhere, a filter over the lens that I can’t remove.
I only skim facebook, letting my eyes slip past the “shared” and “liked” pictures that I don’t want to see, the righteous status updates, the pointless arguments. In our house we don’t really watch the news normally, we are news-readers, but I’ve quit reading even NPR and the BBC, two sites that I usually turn to for restrained, proper-perspective reporting. I am frankly looking forward to The Economist’s take, if it has one, but until that issue arrives in our mailbox I won’t be reading anything else remotely newsy. Looking at photo collages of the babies who passed away makes me feel like a ghoulish voyeur, and catapults me back into the sick-to-my-stomach feeling that has plagued me since Friday, one that I’m trying to escape. I don’t want to know any more about this tragedy. I don’t need to. This tragedy isn’t about me, this grief isn’t mine, and I’m resisting the urge to wallow in it as if it were. Like anyone I have the odd stabbing thrust of anxiety, a momentary awful thought for my own children’s safety – a kiss before school accompanied by the thought “the last time . . .?” These are immediately and easily quieted by the rational, statistics-reciting half of my brain, and to be honest they aren’t entirely new. I was capable of imagining worst nightmares before.
I realize the irony here. In trying to escape it, I am typing my third blog post on it, none of them terribly original, none of them useful. I recognize the futility of my attempts to carefully articulate my thoughts on the subject, and that, too, does not sit well. In certain moments, it seems so terribly, terribly important that I find exactly the right way to think about his, to distill the experience into the perfectly formed sentence, derived from the perfectly formed thought. I will gather it all up into a paragraph of staggering genius, and in so doing will drain from my heart, like the pus from a wound, all of my grief, my fear, my shame, my righteous anger, my quivering vulnerability in the face of this distant experience that is intruding into my daily life.
It’s raining. I like watching the rain from my vantage point on the twenty-somethingth floor of the tallest building on the Gulf Coast. I can see so much from the picture windows of this floor – barges tramping up and down the Mobile River. The rooftops of most of the restaurants, offices, the clubs that dot Dauphin Street. The tops of the trees in Bienville Square, the copper roof of the Regions bank building, the smiling Moon on the Moon Pie sign that hangs on the building across from me. On a clear day, I can see the spire of the sprawling white church where my children go to school, every day, learning and playing and napping and laughing and safe. Safe, I know it. I am glad.