In the last few days there has been a tragedy in Haiti of immense proportions. Perhaps more than a hundred thousand dead, with millions left in a state of extreme suffering. There is no way to fully take in something this huge. Intellectually we can understand the enormity of such a calamity, but on an emotional level I don’t think our human minds are built for events on this scale.
At the same time — literally at the same time — an event occurred to which I obliquely alluded in my blog post the day before yesterday. At the time I was too overwhelmed to speak of it directly. The essential facts were as follows: Somebody I knew personally, a man I esteemed highly from within my own everyday life, died suddenly, and quite unexpectedly. I had last spent time with him that very same day.
Not surprisingly (or so people tell me) as I’ve walked around New York City these last two days I have seen him everywhere. A stranger will walk into a restaurant, or out of the subway, and for a moment, out of the corner of my eye, it appears to be the man I knew. But of course it isn’t, and won’t ever be.
As many of you know, the immensity of an unexpected death can for a while overwhelm everything else. For some period of time after, everything looks just slightly off — you temporarily lose track of “normal”. You observe people discussing politics or relationships, having a stupid argument over something or other, you see the texture of everyday life, and none of it quite adds up. Part of your mind thinks “What difference does any of this make?” There’s a necessary period of readjustment, a gradual feeling of the day-to-day reemerging, of things going back to approximately where they had been. But not quite exactly where they had been.
Because the reminder stays with you that the day-by-day life we live, that every touch of a friend’s hand, that every conversation over dinner (even the stupid arguments), is infinitely precious, infinitely worth fighting to preserve.
And that brings me back to Haiti. I understand that what I have just witnessed in my own personal sphere these last two days, the sense of loss and incomprehension, is also happening about fifteen hundred miles away, but on a vastly larger scale. All of those many thousands of individual lives, colleagues, mothers and daughters, fathers and sons, beloved spouses and lifelong friends, taken in an instant. And the ones who survived are left trying to figure out what “normal” is — how you can recapture the simple innocence of being able to take a day for granted, without constantly questioning reality itself, without continually seeing the dead out of the corner of your eye.
I think the best way we can honor the suffering, in addition to giving to the rescue effort, is to try to keep in mind — however difficult it may be — that every single life lost in Haiti is as deep a tragedy as the loss of someone we know in our own life. We must try to look at what has happened straight on, rather than from the corners of our eyes. I know that this is not possible to do well, but it is necessary to try.