I need to use my words

every day is a gift: that’s why it’s called ‘the present’

Every par­ent of a tod­dler is famil­iar with this refrain: “use your words.” As in, not your fists or your spit or your kick­ing mary janes.

For me, tonight, how­ev­er, I need to use them because some­thing unfath­omably sor­row­ful is hap­pen­ing to my extend­ed fam­i­ly, for which we are all band­ing togeth­er to meet. We have had ter­ri­ble news this week, the details of which I will not dis­cuss here for rea­sons of pri­va­cy, but with which any­one who has ever had a trag­ic fam­i­ly event will be empa­thet­ic with a sense of loss.

In the mean­time, as we deal with the undeal-with­able, I find I need to use my words. My words, writ­ten more than spo­ken, have become a life­line to me, a way to envis­age, as from a dis­tance, what hap­pens on a giv­en day, and a way to con­tex­tu­alise the dif­fi­cult, the ugly, the scary. I’m going to save for myself the words I’m search­ing for in our cur­rent cri­sis, but I think I need to use all the oth­er words at my dis­pos­al to describe, as I love to do (for what­ev­er rea­son) the small, quo­ti­di­en, incon­se­quen­tial, some­times fun­ny, always dear to me things that hap­pen in what is real life, although it some­times feels like real life is noth­ing more than what you’re doing while you wait for some­thing real to happen.

So please bear with me dur­ing a dif­fi­cult time, and know that my “speak­ing” here, my words here, are a curi­ous life­line to me, and out­wards as well.