Welcome to the new tables-version of my journal. Most of the links won't work correctly yet, but so what? :(
This daily self-examination is getting tough. When you try and cut a straight line through the days, it's amazing how many emotional stones you hit; some require days of work to get past without taking a wild detour from the journey's course. Progress is slow.
I had to take a page off-line, it wasn't right. 99.12.04. There wasn't anything wrong except it didn't say what I meant it to say. I intended a graceful flight through a tragedy, but I landed short, and I have some climbing to do before I get to where I meant to be. A lot more climbing--rock-climbing--it's those emotional stones again.
Six firefighters died on Friday night, in Worcester, Massachusetts. Two men trapped and out of air, and four who tried to find them. I didn't know any one of them, but I haven't been right since I heard the news, and saw the fire, and smelled the smoke. I just have not been right.
Grief is imperishable. You can put it off for decades, then when you return to it, the tears are just as fresh, the pain is just as sharp, and the void just as empty as when you buried it. Sometimes worse.
It may be in poor taste to weep for myself, especially at this time of such raw agony for so many who knew and loved those men. But at times of public tragedies such as this, our personal buried grief leaches up through the earthen caps we placed in private, long ago. Unexpectedly we find ourselves knee-deep in the muck of unwept tears, and nowhere dry to stand.
At work last night I said, "I don't know why, but this thing with the fire is really getting to me," and then I had to walk away. I started crying. A flood of memories came back, recollections of a time in my life which I lost, or maybe let slip away, and I had no idea I mourned it so. And even at this moment, I am still not sure what it is I mourn. Is it that I lost something I loved? Or do I mourn because I didn't love enough, when I had the chance?
Once, when I was young, I lived an exciting life and I imagined for myself a dramatic death. I sped to fires riding the back-steps of loud, giant trucks. I even drove them. I donned the Darth-Vader-like breathing apparatus and crawled through smokey rooms where flames rolled across the ceiling like the surface of the sea. I wore the clothes, and spoke the slang, and held a place among rare comrades as a firefighter. I loved the life and devoted my heart and soul to it.
...but that's not entirely true. Not toward the end. When I was seventeen, and through my mid-twenties, I loved and lived and breathed firefighting. But then I started to let it go. I remained a firefighter for a couple years after I lost the passion, and the saddest thing is that the passion didn't die. It didn't die. But I lost it, I couldn't find it, I wouldn't look for it. I gave up on a part of me I will always know was the very best.
And I rage for the dozen years that tomb--the Worcester Cold Storage Warehouse--stood vacant and begging to be destroyed, and we did nothing. We let it take the very best. It just hurts so much...
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