I Gave Myself A Few Days To Think About It...

and posting these thoughts still seems like a good idea.

I didn't post on Tuesday.     (working overtime)   The TV was on where I work, and I saw this year's ceremony from Lower Manhattan on all the available channels.     None of this seemed obsessive to me in and of itself.     Then I started hearing maladaptive stuff from the news anchors like, "It never gets any easier, and probably it shouldn't."    One of the victim's relatives opined that "It's just as bad today as it was the day it happened six years ago" and began to cry.      It's been six years and a giant hole in the ground, located in the most expensive chunk of real estate in America (where mechanization is supposed to be second to none) is still (mostly) a giant hole in the ground.     I was reminded of the opening scenes of the movie  "Mrs. Brown", in which Queen Victoria's attendants are still laying out the late Prince Albert's clothes, on the Queen's orders, as if he were still there to put them on.    

How long did it take the people of Oklahoma to rebuild the Federal Building McVeigh demolished?      How come we didn't see organized groups of victim families insisting that they had the right to control / veto anything that happened on that site in the name of their murdered loved ones?     (I know better than to compare Oklahoma politics to the hotly-contested p---ing match all over a crazy-quilt which we routinely "enjoy" in NYC)

Let me be careful -- I recognize people who have gotten stuck obsessing over loss in a maladaptive fashion because I have done it and sometimes continue to do it myself.      In this entry I'm expressing sentiments I would never use in an actual conversation with a grieving person, because the only person who knows when I'm ready/able to move on, or who has the right to say,   "Now is the time for me to focus on healing"  is me.     I grok this.    I hate the thought that any sentiment I express might have anything in common with opinions expressed (with a sledgehammer) by a bottom-feeding sensationalist like Ann Coulter, but I also worry about the sight of so many people apparently failing to heal or to even acknowledge the concept.      This refusal to progress even a little bit flies in the face of our genetically embedded capacity for healing, and our need to focus primarily on this present day and moment.      

There is a huge difference between the necessary rituals of comemmoration and an insistence upon remaining traumatized, and I refuse to believe any lamented loved ones would see anything good coming from institutionalized debilitation.