thinking about:

Jennifer Hudson, I can't believe that about her mother and brother; and where is her nephew? (I'm still hoping it isn't actually true.) As I said a few days ago I've been listening to her song "All Dressed in Love" while I work on my writing. It will sound different today. I might not be able to listen to it today. (my thoughts and prayers go out to her.)

I saw the movie "Waitress" recently, and liked "Baby don't you cry (the pie song)" and couldn't believe it when I found out the woman, Adrienne Shelly, who wrote the movie, and was an actress in it, also the writer of that song (her little daughter appears at the end of the movie), had been killed. I listen to the song, and I try to still hear it the first way I did, but it wont stay pure, it takes on other tones, being changed by time and sadness.

J.M. Barrie, the writer of Peter Pan. I made the mistake this past week of reading the introduction to Peter Pan. I've seen "Finding Neverland" I know that the mother dies. Yet I was completely unprepared for the number of tragedies that visited this one family, thus the life of Mr. Barrie. It seems to me that only so much grief should be given out to any one group. No more than that which can fit in the palm of a hand. But this was swallowing grief, drowning, vast and heavy.

Does it make me feel lucky? Does it make me feel fragile? I don't know. I know I feel sad, and uncertain, and I don't understand, and I wish it would never be, could never be that way. I want forever. I wish we all had forever. In my own life, I don't really believe my cousin is dead. I wonder if my refusal to accept it dishonors her in some way? But it makes no sense to me. Not at all possible. It seems rather easier to remove myself one step from reality then to weave this piece of information in.

I think of Tuck Everlasting because I like the message it was trying to bring. But it is hard enough to accept the notion of having a time, and that time being over some day, when the some day is after a full long life; I find it nearly impossible to accept when the time is brief, over too soon. When someone dies at the beginning, or even the middle, of what I consider to be a turn.

I remember when I was young, and old was any age more than mine. Now I am 38, and old, I think of mostly as a state of mind, and old enough to have lived long enough for it to be time to die, I think of as being at least 100 years. And even that sounds a brief time to have walked the earth.

Why give her so much, enlighten her, brighten her, fill her dreams full, then take away a piece of her, vast, fracturing her forever? So that no matter how much light finds her, fills her, no matter how she seeks to heal and restore, even though she will surely find joy again, still she can never again be completely whole.

The Pie Song

When the world is grey and bleek
baby don't you cry
I will give you every bit of love that's in my heart
I will bake it up into a simple little pie ***

Baby don't you cry
gonna make a pie
gonna make a pie with a heart in the middle
Baby don't be blue gonna make for you
gonna make a pie with a heart in the middle
Gonna be a pie from heaven above
gonna be filled with strawberry love
Baby don't you cry gonna make a pie
and hold you forever in the middle of my heart
Baby here's the sun, baby here's the sky
Baby I'm your light and I'm your shelter
baby you are mine I could freeze the time keep you in my kitchen with me forever
Gonna be a pie from heaven above
gonna be filled with strawberry love
Baby don't you cry
gonna make a pie and hold you forever in the middle of my heart
ooooh, ooooh....
Gonna bake a pie from heaven above
gonna be filled with butterscotch love
Gonna bake a pie from heaven above
gonna be filled with bananacream love
Baby don't you cry gonna bake a pie
and hold yo-u forever
and hold yo-u forever
and hold you forever in the middle of my heart
****

It is raining and dark, has been all day. And I haven't done any work.
I have that lost feeling (that I don't often have) where nothing seems quite right, feels quite right, though nothing feels wrong either. Nothing calls, and nothing fills, I just am. And thus am uncertain what at the moment to do with me. It isn't a scary lost, with nervousness and sorrow; it is rather just a lacking of personal placement.
I don't think I will ever get used to the idea that people die, so I know I wont ever get used to the reality of it. And I can't hold onto time, not even one moment of it. Not even on a nothing day like today, all grey and raining. It will be gone too soon and I wont get it back.

It is weird to think about all the things that are happening to the people in the world at even given moment. Great joy, shattered sorrow, swimming in the sun, freezing in the cold, dying, being born, falling in love, getting a divorce, eating dinner, eating breakfast, falling to sleep, rising,..I feel impossibly internally and externally still. Filling a moment with stillness.