Hello and welcome to An Altitude Problem, the blog that's housebound on some of the most glorious high-country summer days, and not liking it. I have actually saved posting to this blog for a time when the boredom really struck, and looked forward to it as a brief break from the monotony of the couch.

At the risk of sounding incredibly self-centered, I occasionally procrastinate posting to this blog when there has been a tragedy amongst our circle of friends, because I become a voice that stays online and can be referred to later, and even when I read over back posts, I sound a bit unsympathetic, devoting a paragraph to the life-altering happenings of friends and then telling my own adventures for the week. So in the past, when I have mentioned the deaths of friends (there seems to have been a bunch of 'em lately) I tend to skip over them because the rewriting of the details are just too taxing, and everything that can be said already has been. But it feels crass to not even give those who have left us, and their families, the slightest mention, so I do mention, and hope my readers can read between the lines. And this blog wants to be a happy place, the one place that can afford to be in denial of real life. It wants to be like a trip to the movies is for me- I despise realism in my breaks from reality. I want fantasy, and happy endings rarely found in real life, because real life is hard enough without having to empathize with fictional or semi-fictional character's heartbreak and tragedy.

So, for just a paragraph, I want to mention the Williams family, and the loss of their 16 year old son, Jamon, who had a fatal car wreck on his way home late Thursday night. Since Galen and Lori thought they heard him come home, they did not know anything was wrong until the following morning, when he was not in his bed. They found the accident, along with paramedics just arrived at the scene, the next morning. The report is that death occurred quickly, if not instantly.

I have been doing a good deal of thinking about people's response to tragedy lately, analyzing how people change in the face of it, how my own family and friends have changed in the last few years. I am not referring to myself so much, although I do include myself when I refer to us, but I do not want to minimize the loss of those who have buried spouses, siblings, parents and children by including myself in their ranks, I have not lost any of those. I am sure that if/when I do, I will find the feelings again that are supposed to be associated with loss.

When one is new to it, when it is one's first experience with death, it is so traumatic, and we spend so much precious energy screaming about how unfair, how senseless, how unimaginably wrong, how untimely, how could this have happened. For the first time, we realize what "simply not there" means, and we fight the awful reality of never being able to go back to how it was. We feel the incredible emptiness of a world in which our loved one no longer exists except in memory. Eventually, our tears run out, and in spite of ourselves, we begin tasting our food again, and laughing at a joke, even one that reminds us of our loved one and ends in a sob. We go back to work, we deal with problems as they arise, and we start to live, as much as we feel we owe it to them to stay in our grief forever. The wound, angered as it was by our raw emotions, will always be a little open, because every memory of the person's life ends in remembering the power of our emotions when we lost them, the emotions that make every memory bittersweet.

And then, when it happens again, we wonder if we are expected to go through all those emotions again, start all over, and give this loved one their due, as we did the last one. Or if there is something wrong with us, that we are not able to find the angry, hurt, devastated energy in the loss, like we did the first time. We wonder, for the first time, if we should have been expecting this, or if maybe we were expecting this, in some back reaches of our subconscious, because we are just not falling apart like the first time. So we go through the motions, and instead of expressing our grief, we read it in each other's faces, and we know. Whatever we could say, we know. We cry until we are exhausted, and then we stop, and we go back to work, and back to our lives, and feel guilt that the sky did not fall in, that we did not break down, that we kept on living and breathing and functioning.

And then it happens again. Even to summon the debilitating grief of the first time seems overwhelming, and we feel, to our horror, just a tinge of... apathy? Instead of feeling shock, we feel resignation. Instead of horror, depression. Instead of fighting the loss, we nod and rattle off the details of how it happened, the last time we saw them, what they said, the endearing details of their life, and see other's eyes widen, see them struggling to put themselves in our shoes, see them faltering because they cannot imagine if they had lost someone so dear to them. But we, ourselves, wonder if we have forgotten how to feel anything, we wonder if we will ever realize what we have lost and if maybe a total breakdown is in store for us when we do, or if maybe we have finally come to see death as an inevitable, unavoidable part of life, and stopped giving it the power it demands.

I am not on this tangent because it relates in any way to Galen and Lori's loss of Jamon, only in that their loss has made me a bit introspective about loss and grieving in general. Wendell spent the night here last night, and since I am mostly couchbound (more on that in my next post), he humored me and sat here and entertained me for a while this morning before heading home. It was a topic of discussion then, and a couchbound mind has a lot of time for thinking.

You tell me, I do not know. I do know that with my first experience with death, Lori herself held me, let me cry, rocked me through the endless hour between when I heard those words over the phone, and someone arrived to pick me up. She absorbed some of my incredulity, my outrage and shock that something like this could happen, that someone with a newborn baby and two little girls could die, just like that, under a flaming sunset, on a night just like any other. I hope that someone was there to do the same with her, when she lost her son.

And after that, I am going to have to start a new post to talk about all the crazy stuff happening in our world. I'm going to need to switch mental gears...