Things Fall Apart

I am indulging in my annual funk at this time of year. I was sitting in the rocking chair with my small son and rocking him. Last night I had cooked dinner and eaten, he had cried and cried as he usually does while I'm cooking and eating dinner. I picked him up to rock him and calm him and as his breath settled, first those ragged breaths--residual from too much crying, and then that slow steady breath of a sleeping child, I began to think about this day seven years ago.

I was in the air. I was returning from a brief trip to Europe. I was diverted to Halifax, Nova Scotia--to this day one of the most beautiful places I've ever been. We landed and disembarked. I had seen such a strange mix of the terrible and the beautiful in people that I felt bruised. We were bussed to an empty hockey arena where we would eat and sleep until such a time as our country would let us back in.

I saw adolescents, fresh from their summer vacations, blowing up air mattresses for us. Handing out blankets and food. Playing with small children whose parents were distressed. I saw people step up and show selflessness that cannot be described. I saw people fall apart like houses of cards under too much wind. I went 3 days without sleeping. I saw the people of Halifax come in droves to the arena to take total strangers back to their homes for hot showers and home cooked meals. I was one of those total strangers. We ate blueberry pancakes with maple syrup.

As I held my small son I was thinking of all of those people. Of how they died. And I wonder, what would be worse, the dying at the hands of those whose hate is so strong and so blind that they would willing take the lives of so many strangers as well as their own? Or the moments before dying when you could remember and wish that you had held your child longer, that you had told your husband or wife how much you loved them, that you could laugh one more time with your friend?

We talk a lot about the people who died on That Day. We talk of them in terms of numbers and the senselessness of it all. We talk of them in political contexts of the 'war on terror.' What we don't talk about are those moments...moments when their grief, their regret at the things they did not do in their lives must have been so intense that it would seem to crush them.


I guess I've learned that the more you love the more you have to lose. And the more you have to lose the more you realize the delicate balance we are all living, how we could lose everything in a moment, that it could all come fluttering down like so many leaves of paper.