It'll be a New Year

I had one of those innocuous conversations today. With someone I really like, someone I was happy to be talking to, someone I had not seen in awhile.

She asked how I am, how the family is, in a way that indicated she cared and wanted to hear. So I said it's been a hard time, the past 6 months since Lucas died, that we saw his family, that it was hard.

And she said, "it'll be a New Year". Meaning well, it's a nice thing to say.

I didn't say a lot of what's on my mind - how I don't want to go to Rosh Hashanah or Yom Kippur services, how in the New Year Lucas will still be dead, how the world will still be a place where a 4 year old boy can suddenly leave, where a family can be left with grief.

Yesterday, September 11, I did not think much about Lucas. I thought about all the people who died that day 10 years ago.

But today, September 12, I'm back to where I was. Not looking forward to a New Year, not knowing what it means to make a fresh start when a piece is, and will always be, missing.

And knowing that this is what people my age, which is not that old, and some younger, do all the time. That figuring out how to live with loss is basically figuring out how to live. I don't have it figured out yet.

Many years ago someone told me a year is important because after a year, you've gone through all the seasons. I have no doubt next high holidays will be easier. For now I'm dreading the thought of trying to be present as we read, "who shall live and who shall die". Alen's been listening to a Leonard Cohen version of it in the car - I don't know how. I changed the disc when it came on.