A few days after my first husband died of a heart attack in June 2001, I noticed a little dandelion growing up between the cracks in the concrete steps behind our building. My world had just crashed, and I was flattened out, yet here was this little plant going about its business, striving toward the sun.
“How could a simple dandelion be allowed to be alive,” I asked myself, “when it isn’t here?” It just didn’t make any sense to me.
My life was halted, but for other people (and plants), life went on. Cars still sped down Riverside Drive. Looking outside the window, I saw people walking their dogs and taking toddlers to school in the mornings. In the evenings, I saw them coming home from work, their ties loosened and suit jackets open, lugging groceries.
Friends were reaching out to me left and right, and I felt their love, but I also felt separate from them. I was too young to be a widow – we had just been married 6 months before – and they couldn’t know what I was going through. They were living their normal lives, and yet I could barely get out of bed in the morning. There was a disconnect. It was as though my sky had turned purple. Everything on earth was the same, but the light on it was different. I knew that I would never see things the same way again.
A few months later, 9/11 happened, and everyone’s lives were upended. I felt then that the sky had turned purple for all of us – and funnily, I didn’t feel so alone.
I had knee surgery this week for a torn meniscus, and I’ve been home for the last few days nursing my leg, amazed at how quickly the body heals itself. We also celebrated my mom’s 99th birthday last weekend. It’s been a sweet time of going inward, feeling lots of love from family and friends. I’m so grateful. But I worry that there is another disconnect.
My attention has been on the mundane things in front of me, like walking the dog and ordering groceries. I am trying to hold on to some kind of normalcy. And yet I read the papers and know that the sky is darkening – it will soon turn purple for everyone. Life as we have known it is becoming upended, and it is hard to imagine the changes.
Even though my day-to-day life hasn’t really changed that much yet, I find myself hoping for the best, bracing for the worst, and grieving for the life we have known—hoping that we can and will work together to turn this ship around.