Columbia

There’s six inches of fluffy new snow on the ground.  Snowflakes are sticking together as they fall, forming big snoflake-matrixes that hover and drift, then hesitate and fall. 

Depression is like snow on the poppy fields, like in the Wizard of Oz, only it doesn’t wake you up.  Snow-depression wants you to stay asleep—and it wants to bury you.  It makes you want to be buried. 

My favorite was Willie McCool, the pilot of Columbia.  I didn’t know much of anything about him until he was dead.  I have spent the last week scouring the NASA human spaceflight site, and all the images, videos and sounds archived there from the last days of these remarkable people and their remarkable journey.  Before the crash I knew they were up there, vaguely.  I wasn’t even sure, before the end, that they had not already come home—until I saw the headline; Seven Die. 

Some TV news anchor interviewed some psychiatrist in 1986, at the time of the Challenger disaster, and the psychiatrist made sense, and I have always remembered what he said.  We, who never knew these people, and never tried very much to know anything about them really—people like me—we mourn because these events stir our own buried griefs and cause our own experiences of tragedy to re-emerge.  Our loss in the deaths of seven astronauts is not a conjured lament, nor is it a pretense of loss for something which was not our own.  It is our loss, for we recognize in the public tragedy an infrangible connection to our own, perhaps secret, tragedies, and we are helpless to stem the tide of tears.  The premature end of a life, especially ones like these, recorded with such intricate detail right up to their end, focuses in one aching spot in my chest the termination of all the hopes and dreams I once had, dear things which I saw killed, and precious opportunities which I allowed to die. 

There is an affinity of grief for grief.  Tears apart seek to join.  An unfathomable emptiness here nudges me to move closer to your unfathomable emptiness there.  I am bawling my eyes out because it is one of the saddest things this life will ever know.