october 11.2

cumulative grief

(An earlier entry from today: It's about fashion. Kind of.)

It's been one month. It might seem like longer than that, I'm not sure. I don't have a sense of time anymore, but that's been going on all year. Sometimes I have to think about which *season* it is.

The other night I was flipping though a Newsweek that had been hanging around the living room. It was dated September 17th. It had Bush on the cover with a headline that had something to do with the Supreme Court, I think.

I thought it was strange that there was no mention of WTC, seeing as how this came out a week after. I looked at the index and since there was no mention of New York or bin Laden, I realized this was an issue that had gone to bed before the 11th.

It was like looking at a time capsule, a document that represented "before." Yet it was published only three weeks ago.

If this war goes on for years, does this mean that the news will sound like to does for years on end? I haven't read a paper in 10 days. I feel incredibly guilty about this. I've wanted to focus on work and I'm afraid if I read, I'll read about more victims and their families, and I can't read about that anymore. I just can't. I find myself imaging I'm that person's sister or wife or mother and I can't keep going through that.

I keep NPR on during the day, I catch snatches of the latest. I know what's going on. I'm finding, though, that I can't process it emotionally. I've intentionally stopped absorbing more.

Polly introduced a new term to me yesterday: "cumulative grief." I knew that's what I was dealing with but I didn't have a term for it.

I see this in myself and in my friends. On top of 9/11 there's the added anxiety of unemployment and the possibility that it will be years before many of us can get our careers back on track.

And then there's the shit that happens to all of us in the general course of life. Fights with spouses. Miscarriages. Sick parents. Old boyfriends that hang themselves in the park.

Vincent. I can't tell how I feel about that anymore, if I'm done grieving. I can't separate all the different types of sadness and identify which belong to which event and where I am with each of them.

5:35 p.m. - october 11.