Bookends

The year began with a dear friend's diagnosis of a brain tumor.  It is ending with helping my oldest friend bury her murdered 6-year-old in Newtown, Connecticut.  In between, amongst my circle of closest friends there have been: sudden job losses (and attendant lawsuits), emergency surgeries, sudden hideous implosions of marriages, extended hospitalizations of children, chronic untreatable pain, deaths of parents, familial financial crises, untreatable cancer, and even more causes of grief and worry that are not mine to write about.

2012 was supposed to be the year that the clouds would lift after having spent much of 2011 watching my father die by degrees while descending into kidney failure.  Instead, there has been a steady cover of oppressive anxiety permeating our lives, broken occasionally by glimmers of the good stuff (my successful kidney transplant [lengthy recovery notwithstanding], my brother's wedding, Obama's reelection, Garrick's smooth transition to high school).  I will plead "overwhelming sorrow" as a reason for not posting much this year - it is hard to bear witness to one's constant state of worry and grief.

This is where I would usually insert some hopeful language about booting 2012 out the door and expecting better times in 2013.  Truth is, I can't convince myself.  I fear that 2013 will be just as difficult and worrisome as 2012, and it feels somehow (irrationally) like a character flaw that I can't shake this off or break the cycle.  We will persevere.  But I might not be writing much in 2013, either.