I cried again today.  That used to be a rare occurrence.  Oh,  ASPCA commercials would usually do it to me; those sad puppy eyes and Sarah McLachlan playing some haunting melody,  now however, it's unpredictable but more likely to happen at any point in the day.   

I've tried to be brave and optimistic and busy, oh so busy.  You have too, haven't you?  Be calm and carry on.  After all it's not 1944; I am not my grandmother writing letters to her four sons in uniform; praying constantly for their safe return.  We are not at war; but we are under siege and the stress is doing it's thing to my optimism and my resolve.  

I just read the CNN Coronavirus update that I get every day.  It told the stories of 4 people who had died.  We are becoming numb to the numbers; today, September 28, the global death toll passed 1 million.  It's hard to get your head around the idea of a million; I have a lot of shoes and many more books-my 2500 books take up a dozen bookshelves; but dozens of libraries are needed to hold a million volumes.  For a reader, though, the most important book right now is in the singular, it is the one you are holding in your hands, the one that is holding you enthralled.  

We have to hold the stories of real people in our hands if we have any hope of fathoming the heavy sadness of a world held hostage by a pandemic.  It is not enough to bemoan my annoyance of having to go back to the car for my forgotten mask or not finding a single canning jar or lid on the grocery shelf, of looking at October without trick or treating and November without a houseful for turkey and pumpkin pie; it is in the loss of a humble hardworking trash collector in New Delhi named Vinod Kumar and the struggles of his son to get him help when he fell ill and had to pay the equivalent of a month's wages to get treatment.  That man's eyes haunt me and make me cry.  

Every COVID death is a story that is cut short, a page that is ripped from the book of life.  There are hapless victims, but there are hapless villains too.  The small wedding in Maine that spread the disease to 170 people and resulted in 8 deaths.  Our moments of beginnings and of joy are becoming moments of endings and pain.  We can become actors in a tragedy with an unhappy ending; the parts we never auditioned for but somehow found ourselves cast in that role.

This upheaval of what is normal and expected is permeating every aspect of our lives and it is relentless without an end in sight.  We are tempest tossed without safe harbor.  

So I cry for Vinod Kumar and his son, who I will never meet and then I spread my arms to a hurting world and know that my tears and my hopes and my frustration and my anger will have so little effect.

I made "get out the vote" calls tonight, I've written letters to the editor, I've made fervent pleas and reasoned arguments on Facebook, because there is darkness and corruption and ineptitude in Washington but it's right in our neighborhood too.  We can't look at our families and friends in the same light anymore.  As my friend Nancy said the other night in regard to social media, "I wish I didn't know so much about my friends and neighbors."  We are all scared; we are all uncertain and we are taking sides against each other and justifying the losses.  "We have met the enemy and he is us."

I hope they still have tissues at the grocery store.  I'm running out of tissues, but not of tears.