The day after is sometimes worse than the day.
The day after yesterday, especially for anyone who was near the finish line of the Boston Marathon, is a day of realizing just how close they may have been to disaster. I have a friend who lives in Boston, who was just a few feet away from the blast sight earlier in the day. He’d been there to celebrate Patriots Day, enjoy the Spring day and watch the runners finish the race. He was home when the explosives took lives and injured so many innocent bystanders.
Today he is feeling the after shock of the “what if”.” What if he had stayed later to watch the second group of runners? What if he had been standing near the location of the explosions? There are too many “what if’s” to think about, but that’s what is on his mind today. He gets nervous just thinking about it.
In the hospitals around Boston, the injured have faced the day after with second surgeries, more treatment for wounds and more questions from authorities about what they remember. FBI, police, the DA’s office is asking anyone who took a picture or a video of the race to walk into a police station or any place where investigators are working to share their pictures. There are clues out there in those videos and photographs. Can you imagine how many smart phones are filled with race pictures? Some one has a shot that will break this case wide open.
It is the day after…lives have been changed forever.
Grieving has begun for those families who lost loved ones, the injured are beginning to heal and there aren’t enough hours in the day to figure out who did this.
April 17, 2013 @ 8:57 am
Very nice, Mo! We’ve seen lots of kindness, lots of heroism, lots of goodness of the human spirit but we’ve also seen evil, sadness, loss, profound sorrow and pain. Perhaps one day we’ll all remember this day for its goodness and not so much for its evil. But that day is far away!
April 16, 2013 @ 5:04 pm
I learned late in the afternoon the daughter of a friend had crossed the finish line and was a block or so away when the first blast occurred; her husband just minutes before had decided not to stay at the end line once she’d cross. Another friend’s son, a student at a university in Boston, was at the finish and saw the horror so up close. How will he ever erase that image? Still another friend, resident of Boston, decided against going this year to the finish line but she had friends in the race; fortunately, all made it, though how can one say they came through “unscathed”? My heart goes out to the more than 170 people injured and the families of the three whose lives were senselessly lost.
There is a beautiful poem, “Kindness”, by Naomi Shihab Nye that speaks to this unspeakable tragedy so well. Its opening lines: “Before you know what kindness really is / you must lose things, / feel the future dissolve in a moment / like salt in a weakened broth….//” Toward the end, the lines read, “Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside, / you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing….”
We know too much of sorrow, each of us.
The poem is in Nye’s collection “The Words Under the Words”.