The terrible, horrible, no good, very bad week

The week that began on Sunday the 14th has been surreal and terrifying and overwhelming and awful.  I’m trying to write down some thoughts, and I’m not doing a ton of editing here.  I just felt compelled to find a way to process through some of this, and thought I’d share it here.

On Sunday evening, I went to see the Huntington Theater Company’s performance of Ryan Landry’s M at the Paramount Theater in Boston with my lovely friends Ian and Elizabeth.  After the show, we had a delicious dinner at the Salted Pig and we sat around talking about theater, art, camp, life, and everything else.  It could have been 1994 all over again, except maybe for our hair, which was much more purple back then than it is now.  Being with the two of them, friends I’ve known since college, the world felt warm and safe and good (and also delicious, and very funny).  I drove us back from Boston (where the play was) to Somerville (where they live) with my Boston-driving skills, which have developed considerably over these years I’ve spent being a Massachusetts resident.  Our driving path, which I thought I knew relatively well, was repeatedly diverted by the preparations being made for Monday’s Marathon.  Tents and barricades and viewing stands were being set up, and traffic was being re-routed.  I circled a block a couple of times, a fact I recalled, darkly, late Monday afternoon, imagining that my license plate was surely registered in some database of suspicious activity in the area that night.

Monday was a lovely day. I sat outside, grading papers.  The grading part was not fun, but the being outside was.  Since I was outside, I didn’t have the radio on, and didn’t have my computer with me.  I didn’t know what had happened until I went to pick up Lucy at Mary’s house at 4pm.  Lucy had heard the word “explosion” on NPR there, at which point Mary had turned off the radio.  The girls were unaware of anything going on, but Mary mouthed the basic scenario “Marathon.”  “Bomb.”  She didn’t have to say more for me to know that things were bad.  I hurried home to tell Jake that we were simultaneously on media blackout (for Lucy) and that we needed to get ourselves up to speed on what was happening.

We spent the rest of the evening actively keeping any information from Lucy while taking in information non-stop ourselves.  Where were Cole and Bianca and Angela?  What about Ian and Elizabeth?  Paul and Kathy?  Are our people safe?  Because apparently, a lot of people weren’t safe.  It was bad.  Via JB’s Facebook and my Twitter, we were mostly assured of the safety of our dear ones, but we were increasingly aware of how many people weren’t having the same experience.

On Tuesday and much of Wednesday, it was difficult to focus.  Despite the fact that we never turned on TV news, and that we had all radio off when Lucy was around, we were still awash in up-to-the-minute details of the investigation and the continual unfolding of information about the victims.  I taught my classes and attended campus events and met with students, but it was through a bit of a haze.  If none of these Boston events had happened, it actually still would have been a really difficult week.  I was overscheduled into events and obligations, and it’s advising season, so I have a lot of anxious students who need appointments.  I was behind on teaching prep, and facing too many to-dos on my various lists.  And now, everything was tinged with a surreal news-cycle-freak-out overlay.

On Wednesday night, I was scheduled to go into Boston with a group of students who are taking our course on Greek & Roman literature.  We had booked a block of tickets to see the SITI Company’s performance of Trojan Women at Arts Emerson. A few students chose not to come; we had sent out a message saying that we would understand if anyone did not feel safe going into Boston.  But I went, and most of the students went.  It felt good.  It didn’t feel brave.  It felt right, though.  I walked around a bit before the show, over to the Boston Common.  I stepped into a pizza place and grabbed a slice.  The TV was on there, and everyone was glued to it, even though there was nothing new.  Or was there?  I couldn’t tell.  The non-stop news feed starts to feel so crazy.  I took my slice to go and ate outside, in the Common.  It was beautiful.  I love Boston.

For those not familiar with the area, here's a map.  A is the theater where I was on Sunday night; B is the finish line for the Marathon; C is the theater where I was on Wednesday night.  It's all right there.

We went to the play. The Trojan Women is a play by Euripides, first performed in 415BC.  In it, the women of Troy – Hecuba, Cassandra, Andromache, and Helen – lament, rage, argue, and mourn about the terrible losses they have experienced during the siege and destruction of Troy.  They have lost, in terrible violence, their children, their husbands, their parents, their sibling, their friends.  It’s an incredibly powerful play in any setting, but everyone in this Boston audience was hit hard by it.  One of the most painful moments of the tragedy occurs when the Greek envoy demands that Andromache turn over her infant son, Astyanax, to be thrown over the walls of the city, since the Greeks fear he will grow to avenge his father, Hector.  In this production, there was added horror when the envoy returns to tell the characters and audience that Andromache has smothered Astyanax so that he will not suffer at the hands of the soldiers.  There was wailing on the stage as the women mourned and practiced their religious rites.  There was weeping in the audience, for the characters before us, but obviously, for the grief and horrors we knew many had experienced and were still experiencing in our city.

Thursday morning, I pulled myself together and went to campus to teach.  Waiting for me when I got there was an e-mail informing me that our college’s former dean, who had stepped down when her cancer had become too severe for her to work, had passed away overnight.  This was another terrible blow.  Adding to this was the fact that one of the day’s events was a huge campus event celebrating the opening of a new building on our campus, a building that started largely because of the vision and hard work of Dean Nina Coppens.  I never made it to the event, because my office was filled with advisees seeking help and freaking out.  I finished my classes, met with students, attended another evening event, and went home, completely depleted and wanting nothing more than ice cream and pajamas.  I forgot to mention, too, that on Wednesday, Jake caught some sort of nasty stomach bug, so he’d been feeling miserable all week, too.  We went to bed early with our weariness and our worry. 

And when we woke up Friday, the world had gone insane.  Jake got a notice to not come to work at Seven; Watertown – suddenly a city name everyone knows – was in total lockdown.  Another round of frantic facebooking, twittering, and general check-ins revealed again that we and our friends and family were still the lucky ones; we were safe.  Many of our co-workers and friends were in the area of the lock-down and were huddled in their homes.  As we saw the images of the SWAT teams going door-to-door in Watertown, Jake pretty much saw his work neighborhood, but as if it was the setting for some kind of military siege movie.  Here’s a map that shows (B) the location of the house with the boat where the second suspect was finally cornered and captured, and (A) Jake’s work:

He bikes past that house regularly.  He eats at the restaurants you see in the background of the coverage.  I keep thinking “it’s surreal,” and that word is not enough, but I don’t have any others.

Last night, Lucy’s BFF came over for a sleepover.  The girls chatted giddily until 10pm when they finally fell asleep.  It was a relief from the horrors of the news to hear them.  

It was a relief to hear of the capture of the second man without further incident.  It has been an exhausting and terrible week.   We are thankful that our friends and family are fine, and that we are fine.  We have so much to be thankful for.

The news keeps coming.  Many of the victims are local.  Jeff Bauman, one victim of the bomb who lost both legs, and who apparently helped to identify the bombers, was formerly a student at my school.  Another alumni was seriously injured.  A young girl from Lowell High sustained injuries; her mother lost her legs.  Many people from my campus were at the marathon or in the marathon.  Many live in Watertown, Newton, and the other Boston suburbs.  The older of the two brothers who wreaked this havoc was a boxer who used to train here in Lowell.  We feel uneasy.  I’m afraid to click on the CNN tab, at the same time that I feel like I have to.  What’s the latest?  Is there anything more? 

There’s a sketch that JB and I love on That Mitchell and Webb show that imagines a post-apocalyptic world in which there is a game show on television; on it, they constantly say “DON’T THINK ABOUT THE EVENT,” without ever really saying what the event was.

I’m going to try to take the rest of the day to not think about The Event.  And not think about this week.  Except for the parts that involve my friends, my family, my community doing good, caring for each other, and trying to make the light of the world – love, joy, art, beauty, community -- brighter than the darkness.  It’s a sunny day here.