miscellany

The Pope is in town today, and since I’m a recovering Catholic (I can’t really say ex-Catholic because it’s not like I was officially excommunicated), you won’t see me lining up along the PopeMobile route to wave at him, nor attending the mass he’s conducting at Nationals Stadium tomorrow. John Paul II had a certain amount of charisma—almost an aura of rock star quality (or at least as much rock star quality as you can possess when you’re wearing a gigantic white hat)—that may have led me down to the PopeMobile route, despite not agreeing with his policies. But Benedict XVI? Not so much. Still, I hope the visit goes smoothly, protestors and all. At least he’ll have lovely spring weather for the occasion.

This is making me realize that after 10½ years of living in the greater DC area, I still haven’t visited the Basilica downtown. It’s the largest Catholic church in North America—one that I’ve passed who knows how many times while on the Metro—and I’ve never been there. Huh. I should work on changing that, because it looks like a truly beautiful building.

This is one of those bipolar days when I need to crank the heat and wear a winter coat in the morning and by afternoon I’m in short sleeves with all the windows in my car rolled down. And the cherry blossoms outside my office, which grace us with a week or so of delicate, incandescent fire, have begun that annual war where green and pink engage in rigorous hand-to-hand combat for control of the trees, with green winning in the end.

It’s also the one-year anniversary of the Virginia Tech massacre. April is the cruelest month indeed. Stuffed with memories of Virginia Tech, Waco, Oklahoma City, and Columbine, it has become a peculiar month that simultaneously straddles beginnings (the proverbial rebirth of spring) and endings.

In that vein, yesterday marked 17 years since my much-adored grandmother passed away. I think that with a lot of deaths, the full extent of what has been lost is only realized years later. With my grandmother, it’s sinking in now—nearly two decades later—just how many things she never lived long enough to see. She was around to see my sister graduate from high school but missed the rest of her grandkids’ high school graduations and all of our college graduations. She didn’t get to see two of her grandkids get married and have kids. She didn’t get to see my aunt happily retire to her dream home or see my mom develop a stable new life after a chaotic divorce. If you believe in a traditional religious afterlife, it’s easy to say, “My loved one is up in heaven and is watching everything that’s happening, even if s/he can’t be here to experience it.” But when you don’t believe in an afterlife? That sense of loss gets no easy resolution.


song heard most recently before posting:
The Walk—Imogen Heap