Good-bye to a dear friend whom we lost last night. He was away from home on business and so was not near his wife, was not near his children who live overseas and who must have received the call in the middle of the night that we all fear. Nothing good comes out of this- even those silver-lining people can't argue this- it is simply what it is- a loss.
A block from work the street was taped off, policemen (all male) were drawing lines on the ground and measuring the distance of the car from the sidewalk, making calculations perhaps of how fast the car was moving when, based on the bags strewn in the middle of the street with what looked like groceries or lunch or something scattered all over, it had apparently hit someone. The front left side of the pickup was dented pretty seriously- it must have been turning at a not-so-slow speed.
This afternoon a plane crashed into the Hudson- a US Air commuter plane with 150 people or so on it. We were getting out of a meeting when it fell but could see the tail and the ferries rescuing people and the line of sirened and ready vehicles on West Side Highway waiting to take the injured to hospitals.
It's an eerie feeling- losing someone and being what feels like a ghost (a living ghost) trapped in the land of the living. A period of mourning allows us to stand at the edge and acknowledge the fine line that separates us from the dead. When we return to our lives we are able to focus on living. Today was surreal- the living and dead playing their roles in the same space with too faint a delineation.
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