There are no words

How quickly life can change.  From one minute to the next our world is fundamentally, forever different.  This happens all the time.  Anything can happen any time.  Your child can one minute be dancing in a sunny studio on a warm March day on a bucolic New England college campus...and the next minute be lying on the bricks 20 feet below, fighting for her life next to the lifeless, twisted body of her friend.  Your child can one minute be singing the alphabet song in first grade and the next minute....oh my god, it's too horrifying to imagine.

Maybe it's because I can't sleep and I'm worried about my sister who's having major surgery today, or maybe it's because I'm thinking about all of our kids being dropped off to school today by their parents, just like every other kid on every other day in every other town in America.  Things are more dramatic in the middle of the night maybe.  no, that's not it...this is real, this is not at all dramatic.

How are we supposed to make sense of this?  I want to get everyone I love together and hide, I want to go somewhere safe where people don't have guns, where people aren't mentally ill and want to fuck everything up so they feel better.  I know it's a juvenile way to think, but at 4 in the morning it's my impulse.  I don't feel very brave today.

I know that in a couple of hours I will be brave, I know I'll be able to be in the parking lot as parents drop their kids off, I know I'll give a lot of hugs this morning and I'll look parents in the eyes and tell them that their kids will be safe today.

I miss Mark so much right now.  I think that if we had to be apart for one more week during all this I'm not sure I could do it.  I'm really overwhelmed by everything; there's even more going on that I just can't put in this blog.  I'll be ok, I'll do what I need to do.  Most importantly, today I need to hug, reassure, just be there.  When Mark comes back to Connecticut on Friday I'll get my comfort from him.  And Lea Ann too, she's my rock these days, my voice of reason and my confidant.  What would I do without my lafm?

I was cleaning the basement yesterday morning and found a journal that I started in the winter of 2007 when I was still an assistant principal at Fermi high school.  I was really not loving that job and was seriously considering taking a year-long sabbatical.  Laura had actually put that idea in my head during a cab ride to JFK one day.  In my journal I made a list of all the things I would do if I had a year off.  Yoga, cooking, being in touch with old friends, hiking, reading, etc etc.  And then I took the job at Odyssey.  That was actually the last page that I wrote in that journal.  It's like I knew that I had one more job that I had to do before I was able to take a year off.  And now, in the blink of an eye, I'm 5 days away from my sabbatical.  Isn't life funny.  Not ha-ha funny, just so very strange and wonderful and terrifying and beautiful.

So now I'm going to make another cup of coffee and write some thank you notes to the families who got me lovely, thoughtful goodbye gifts.