Can this all be solved today?
The rain is pouring down now, distracting me from my administrative chore and making me wistful and melancholic. Mom is stable – at a lower level, her vent at a higher level. I’m one foot into the weekend. Today is 9/11.
Flashback to September 11, 2001, I was barely getting out of bed when my then mother-in-law called to tell me to turn on the news – we rose, we watched, we sank into the horror from the television set. I told T last night, America has never been the same since, she said the world has never been the same since.
2001 – September, America is attacked. October, I ran the Portland marathon. November, I opened the door to the devil. December, my mother went into the hospital and was in ICU for ten days.
Every year we mark time – the 8 year anniversary of 9/11, the 4 year anniversary of Katrina – indelible dates on life’s calendar.
A friend writes that after her son-in-law died this past summer, suddenly leaving behind two small children, they have decided to take the 2009 calendar and burn it at the end of this year as if this year didn’t exist. Meanwhile, I refer to this year as the summer of our discontent; it held so much promise but began to lose ground first with the death of my beloved Arlene, then my mother taking ill, and just seemed to go on and on with dead bodies stacking up left and right, and summer’s ending, yet, just in the past day I’ve heard of a new cancer diagnosis, one heart attack, one death of old age. The grave is open, still, even as fall approaches.
A friend writes to me and sends me Rilke:
Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.
— Rainer Maria Rilke