Terrifying But Not Terrorism

“Dressed in the lion's skin, the ass spread terror far and wide.” - Jean de La Fontaine

It has been a tough week in Toronto with innocent people plowed down on our main street by a young man in a rental van.  At this point there are 10 confirmed dead and more than a dozen injured. Incidents like this don't happen in our city.  We watch this happen in other places and post our hashtags on Facebook and Twitter - #LondonStrong #PrayingForParis #MunichStrong ...  We pride ourselves on our inclusive and tolerant culture, at times a bit too smug while convincing ourselves it could not happen here.  And then it did.  It happened within walking distance of my home in a very place where I had been walking just a couple days before.  In a place I considered going to again the morning of the attack.  There is a craft store there that I often frequent and I was out of the colour paint I wanted for a new project. But I had other things to do so I set aside my need to shop for paint for another day, almost as if God had whispered in my ear.

Monday was the most glorious of spring days, our first following a relentlessly brutal winter.  People were anxious to be outside, to breathe in the air and feel the sun on their faces.  It was a day that felt like nothing could happen to dent our happiness.  I was shocked when I heard the news. And my prayers began, for those who were hurt and killed, for their families who may never have the chance to say goodbye, for those who witnessed horrors that will never be erased and then for the thing it was hard to speak out loud - dear God, please let this be the act of an ordinary madman and not the act of an Islamic terrorist.  I know this last prayer may seem bizarre to others but not to some.  I cannot be alone in praying that this horrible action would not feed hate and fear of others and retaliation against Muslims and minorities.  

Watching news reports of the events on different stations, was telling.  In the first hours, few details were given on the Canadian stations.  No one would speculate on the ethnic origin of the driver,  his religion or motive.  It was hours before we even knew his name.  I heard only words of unity, not a single word of hate expressed on the air.  Politicians didn't jump in with their rhetoric though we are on the border of an election cycle.  Our city truly went into wait and see mode.  Yonge Street was cordoned off and people were asked to stay away from the area and in the main, they did.  The news was not quite handled the same way by the international media.  CNN commentators spoke of how slow the Canadians were being in giving them information about the driver, who was arrested without a single shot being fired.  There were comments that he looked Middle Eastern, that the attack was typical of an ISIS inspired or engineered attack and that the driver was known to Toronto police.  On-line, disinformation spread like wildfire on far-right sites.  Then we all watched the footage of the driver being arrested.  He didn't look Middle Eastern to me.  

Two days later, we know that he is a twenty-five year old college student with mental health issues. He was not known to police. He is not affiliated with any group that presents a threat to our national security.  We don't know what his ethnic origin is or whether or not he subscribes to any religious ideology and we don't care.  He is a Canadian man who according to his elementary school classmates has always been socially awkward.  There is some evidence that he is involved with a group of people who identify themselves as incels (involuntarily celibate) who are angry with women for rejecting them and with the men who are not rejected - sick and sad. 

When it became known that this was not an act of terrorism, the international media soon lost interest.  I guess there isn't much mileage to be gotten from an act that was driven by madness, that involved no guns. I, for one, am glad they have moved on.  These are sad days for our city.  We need to mourn in peace, away from the spotlight, away from the poison of the lies that feed division.  We kept calm and carried on - helping our neighbours, embracing our humanity. This is Toronto.  We are good and we are strong.

Pajama Day

“Chilling out on the bed in your hotel room watching television, while wearing your own pajamas, is sometimes the best part of a vacation.” - Laura Marano

I have been trying to recall when, if ever, I have spent a day in my pajamas when I wasn't desperately sick or recovering from surgery.  Then there was today.  It is six o'clock in the evening.  I am still in the pajamas I put on at six o'clock last night.  In fact, I'm still in my bed watching innocuous movies and playing Words With Friends.  It has been a wasted day and a needed day.  I am teetering on the edge of burnout, putting in too many stressful work hours in the winter that will never end.  It has been alternately snowing and sleeting since nine o'clock last night, my windows a constant patter of ice pellets hitting the panes.  I am forgetting what the sun looks like in the ever grayness of the sky.  It is April 14th and bewilderingly it is still winter.

My plan was to get some spring cleaning done in these days of my husband's absence while he is on his annual golf vacation.  But my closets are in the same disarray that they were in yesterday.  I am housebound, yet unable to muster enough interest to do anything in my house.  Some pretty new stones I bought last week are languishing in my craft room as is the necklace I promised to repair for my sister.  A half dozen pieces of furniture are waiting for my creative touch.  If I go downstairs, I will feel guilty for not at least making a start at getting them done but I can't see them from my bedroom.  Out of sight, out of mind.

I was supposed to have an overdue dinner with some friends but they live in a country home, too far from the city to make the perilous drive tonight.  I would order in dinner or go and pick it up but it is far too nasty outside to ask anyone to deliver it or to venture out for it myself.  I have some mussels in the freezer that I can always heat up or I can make a bowl of angel hair pasta with a portobello cream sauce.  I'm reasonably sure there is one last split of prosecco in the fridge.   I might even take a bath and change my pajamas if I can summon the energy.  I'm afraid to look at the weather forecast for tomorrow.  Eventually, I will have to get out of bed.

Pieces

“The worst thing about falling to pieces is that humans can do it so quietly.”
― r.i.d

At the end of my treatment for breast cancer in 2006, a very generous friend treated me to a day at a luxurious spa on Queen Street.  I had a pedicure and body scrub followed by a hot stone massage.  When the therapist put a hot stone on my solar plexus, I started to cry, small tears at first which developed into a salty sea.  I was embarrassed by my tears, unable to stop them and stunned by my level of grief.  For nearly a year, I had been brave through the pain of two surgeries, the debilitating side effects of chemo and the almost paralyzing fatigue of daily radiation.  I put my best face on every day and went to work.  I still ran my home and looked after my family.  I didn't see the meltdown coming.  If I was going to fall apart, I expected I would have done it earlier.  I had survived, there was nothing to cry about at that point.

For the last two years, I have once again been staring my morality straight in the eye.  Two surgeries, lots of pain, lots of fear.  Heart failure and heart failure the sequel.  I've mostly been brave.  I put my best face on for every medical appointment, wanting my doctors to like me enough to work hard at saving me.  I put my best face on to go to work.  I run my home and I try to take care of my family and friends.  Through the grace of God, I have survived.  The news is good.  The surgery has been declared a success.  And yet, now on the other side of it, I am feeling those small cracks begin along the fault lines of my soul.  I suspect the crash is coming.  I'm not looking forward to it but maybe it's what I need to let the true healing begin.

Checking My Balance

"Where wealth is health, bankruptcy is death." - John Maiorana

Last week I started to wonder if I have become emotionally bankrupt.  As silly as it sounds, this pondering was a result of my response or lack thereof to the last two episodes of This Is Us.  My friends were posting on Facebook that they had cried buckets after the late night airing of an episode on Super Bowl Sunday.  Another episode aired on Tuesday night.  Some of them were still crying on Wednesday.  Then I started to see magazine articles popping up in my newsfeed about how heart wrenching the episodes were.  I really like This Is Us and normally my emotions tend to be a bit close to the surface.  I'm that person who cries at Hallmark card commercials.  But for some reason, I didn't shed a tear during either of those episodes.   I could appreciate the theater of them but they left me feeling nothing. 

So, living in my head, as I have been doing lately, I started to worry.  Why are my emotions so flat?  What is wrong with me?  I thought perhaps it was just cabin fever.  On the day my post-surgical restrictions were lifted, I celebrated by putting my hair in a ponytail (a two-armed task which I had not been allowed to do), drove to the grocery store and the hardware store.  My mood improved a bit but I still felt pretty flat.  A few days later, there was another mass shooting at a school in Florida.  I can now definitely state that I am not emotionally bankrupt.  I cannot stop crying.  I am experiencing a depth of sadness that I haven't felt for a long time.  How is it possible, I keep wondering, that one morning a group of mothers kissed their teenage babies goodbye and dropped them off at school for what would be the very last time because they would be shot to death in the corridors and classrooms by another teenager with an automatic, legally obtained gun?  How is it possible that their senators and congressmen, governors and even president lack the will and interest to do what needed to be done so long ago to keep them safe?  What were their lives worth to the politicians who took so much money from the NRA?  Maybe I don't actually want to know.

Emotionally bankrupt - no, just saving my deepest emotions for things that are real and I can add a lot more emotions to the list.  I am not just sad, I am outraged.  I am scared for my American family, for my cousin Stephanie who is a teacher, for her daughter Bella who is a little school aged child.  I am resolved to do something about this horror.  I don't know what and there are some who will say it is not my country - not my business but of course I will not, cannot accept that.  There are no borders that restrict love for family and care for others.  I don't know what the right action is for me to take now but I will figure it out.

Waiting for Parole

“Stone walls do not a prison make, nor iron bars a cage.” – Richard Lovelace

It has been a little more than three weeks since my surgery and I'm suffering badly from cabin fever.  Everyone has been really kind, offering to drive me around or do my errands for me.  While I'm very grateful for their attention and kindness, I am climbing the walls.  I don't want to be driven around.  I don't want to be accompanied on every errand.  I just want to get in my car and drive to the craft store or the bead store and spend an hour wandering the aisles and looking at all the things I don't need but that give me joy to look at and that spark my creativity.  I want to pop down to the hardware store and pick up a case of canning jars, come home and can the dark sweet cherries that are freezing on my back deck and mix up a batch of wild blueberry jam and some grapefruit jelly.  I want to paint the table with the carved legs that has been calling to me to be refinished but that I am not allowed to lift for another week.  I'm waiting for my four week post-surgery sentence to end - waiting for parole.  

Another week and I will be able to go back to physio, which I have so much missed, not just for the relief it gives to my aching bones but for the way my therapist Claire, soothes my soul and spirit.  A couple of treatments under her capable hands and I will once again have the feeling back in my left toes as well as two functional shoulders. I can hardly wait.  

I'm trying to be patient.  Trying to understand the lessons of this latest challenge to my mortality.  Looking for the gifts that this problem surely carries in its hands.  I'm finding it a little harder this time but I'll get there.