Brothers and Sisters, please forgive me for I started typing this less than an hour before the regularly scheduled post time.
I knew this would be my topic when I volunteered for this week last Sunday. And yes, I seem to be writing about the darker side of things more often.
But after everything that happened this week, it's more important than ever.
Welcome to Brothers and Sisters, the weekly meetup for prayer* and community at Daily Kos. We put an asterisk on pray* to acknowledge that not everyone uses conventional religious language, but may want to share joys and concerns, or simply take solace in a meditative atmosphere. Anyone who comes in the spirit of mutual respect, warmth and healing is welcome.
Mourning is harder when deaths occur near the holidays.
This was the wisdom my mother passed on to me the year the local funeral home went from the place I'd never been in to the place I spent too much time in. Two men who had been barely hanging on to life for too long - one family, the other as good as - gone in a matter of months. And one of them died too damn close to Christmas.
I wouldn't quite understand until a few years later, and then I would recognize it was really a simplification of a larger pattern.
We lost the first member of the cohort I grew up with in early September, and we were just barely getting to the point where half the class wasn't keeping up with the date anymore and the other half was being quiet about it but you could tell by the sadness in the hallways that yes, a whole lot of people were remembering and counting the days.
"Today was the day she died. Today was the day we found out about it. Today was the day we kept her family company in the funeral home. Today was the day we buried her. Today was the day those of us who go to church went to church and our youth pastors had to scramble to figure out how to handle us."
A week or more of anniversaries, 'first times after', and so on.
9/11 happened on one of those days, when those who only marked the actual anniversary were still raw and no one else who remembered was doing any better than they were.
And every year since, the reminder with every single "NEW SPECIAL. NEW FOOTAGE. TUNE IN." announcement on the TV for a 9/11 memorial something-or-other: "The anniversary is coming. She's been gone another year. Just add a few years to the statistic every news program is blaring at you and you'll know how long."
This year was a light year for the news coverage. It was finally not-as-bad, after years of not being allowed to forget. I marked the day because there are other personal anniversaries around it now, kinder ones, but it was back to the silent counting of days it once was. Which was nice, because this year was one of the Big Deal anniversaries anyway, the same way five years after was, the same way a decade after was.
(I imagine I'm not the only one who didn't lose anyone that day who is thanking whatever force in the universe is behind the shutting up at last for not being reminded so forcefully of all the other little losses that just happened to fall so close to that date.)
It's human nature to see things happen around the same time of year and correlate the coincidences. We were doing it on the playground before I could read a calendar - a flower just happened to bloom just before the school year ended then, and we took it as a sign of the summer to come. Every time I've left a church on bad terms, it was Holy Week, and it adds associations onto Good Friday that I know no one else I sit in church with on that day shares. We see famous deaths come and count out threes - and if it takes noting the passing of someone who wouldn't be of note otherwise to round out the set, the 24-hour news channels will do it.
After all, it's how we managed to figure out all the coincidences that weren't just coincidences. Even if it means one anniversary reminding us of another. Given the choice between not having this anniversary problem or never figuring out putting water on seeds helps them grow, I'll take the pain and keep the agriculture.