Friday, April 10, 2009

Invincibility

Sorry for the drag.

It's easy to feel invincible. ...Until X. Until someone gets sick. Until you hit NN years old. Until someone has a baby and you start to understand that there could possibly be someone more important than you, or your wife, or your parents, or your brothers. Until whatever.

Then it happens. And this is an ABC after-school special. You're in a young company, been there forever; suddenly everyone's getting married, then everyone's having kids, everyone's buying a house. Life is good. Might not be great, but life is good. Hell, life could be fantastic. Future post, perhaps.

How do you, collectively and individually, deal with what has to be the absolutely ultimate tragedy? I don't even know the extent of this. And I'm serious. I pretend to understand -- by which I mean I dread to understand -- the feeling. I'm operating on the inability to process. In absence of the ability to process it, I have to pretend I can process it. That leads to all sorts of thoughts ranging from expected to "what the hell."

I don't want to admit it, but I generally don't know how to act, or react, when I get bad news. It goes way back to the fact that I need to play a role, be a protector, than anything else. Of course, the fact that I'm disturbed by that fact only serves to disturb me more. Why aren't I crying? And I've only gotten bad news twice in my "adult" life beyond grandparents when I was 13 or younger or a buddy that we lost in the military a number of years ago. Aside from those, though, it's been twice in the last week. And it's been a hell of a week to grow older, actually. We all grow older, we form bonds, we make babies, we lose babies, we gain friends, we lose friends, we gain life, and we lose life.

That right there is too introspective to dwell upon.

2 comments:

Hillary said...

When Chris told me about bad news part 2, I just sat on the couch and said Oh. My. God. close to a hundred time. Senseless loss is impossible to process. I can't even begin to imagine that kind of loss. It's easy to let an irrational fear take over... like maybe this bad news will hit closer to home next time? my friend? my baby? My heart goes out to all of you at ST.

Jack said...

Nicely written. I'm with you. Let's hope that's the last call to the lobby we all have to get.