There is so much sadness in the world that sometimes I feel swallowed by it.
How can I live my daily life—putting on the kettle for tea, scrounging in my wallet for change to pay my library fines, helping my daughter put on her socks—when twenty small children were gunned down in their classrooms shortly before Christmas?
What happened in Newtown is devastating, and I can hardly think of it without weeping. But it’s only a few grains of sand on a beach of incredibly sad occurrences.
I’m reading A Train in Winter right now, about female resisters in occupied France. And while it’s fascinating, it makes my heart hurt. One woman was arrested at home, with her 6-month-old baby boy sleeping in the next room. As they led her away, she realized no one knew to retrieve him.
My own little boy, who will be ten months old in just a few days, is sick with a mild fever. All day he has slept: in my lap, in my arms, on my back. His body is warm and flushed, his eyelashes like soft feathers. My daughter’s fever dissipated in the small hours of the morning, but she is still sleepy, and she curls up against my body all the same. She reaches out and holds her brother’s hand in hers.
There are times when I can hardly go on knowing what I know of the world. That people can be cruel and violent and bitter and hateful. That these things can and do happen, more than once, over and over, and that they probably will in one form or another, forever. I find myself wishing I’d never fallen in love, never had children; I fantasize about living alone in the wilderness.
I feel things too deeply, sometimes.
But in the end, these small fleeting moments of happiness—my daughter holding my son’s hand, the glow of a lighted room on a winter evening, the way my husband’s lips feel on the back of my neck when I’m washing dishes—are what I choose to believe in. The rest is there, of course, and it haunts me. But I cannot dwell on the sad things. I would drown in them.
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