For Natasha Richardson and My Mother

I dreamt about Natasha Richardson last night. Alex told me that she died yesterday and my heart ached for her family, so much so that these anxieties and compassion invaded my subconscious.

She was the exact age my mother was when she died in a freak accident. Forty-five is too young to die. Kids barely grown, your life is ahead of you, you've come to that comfortable place where you know who you are, where life should get somewhat easier, more rewarding. It should not abruptly end in a random, meaningless accident.

And so, my heart aches for her children, her husband, her mother, and everyone else around her who feel the impact of her death, her loss, her love and her life.

I'm sitting here writing, trying to stay stealthily quiet as my husband and baby sleep in the next room. There exists, for me, a new vulnerability as I cannot imagine my life without these two people. Tragedies like the one the Neesons face force us to remember how fragile life hangs, how our hearts float in a tender space between tragedy and loss. In that hollow of wholeness, lies our peace and our happiness, but it is threatened by the unpredictable, the many permutations of chance that could crush our present bliss.

A year after my accident, I decided that I would take chances, live life to the fullest because I was acutely aware of life's fickleness. I went to England, studied, made friends, traveled around the world, moved to New York on a whim, starting writing a book, fell in and out of love with someone in Paris, worked in the lives random families, and finally met my true partner, a man with whom I can finally trust to catch me when I'm down.

Having a baby completely changed my spirit for adventure. There is a caution I feel, heavy against my heart, that prevents me from going on the same excursions and living as whimsically as I did before. It is now, that I realize how I have not completely gotten over my mother's death. The thought of losing someone else I love just about kills me.

I am slowly starting to trust more in Alex, in myself, in God, but there are moments like these, when the world feels senseless and my heart feels burdened, that I have a hard time accepting the axom; 'everything happens for a reason.' Sometimes, it feels as though there is no reason good enough to lose someone who shaped your life.

Here is a poem by Rilke that I have put in a chapter of my book;

Roads leading nowhere

between two meadows,

as if detoured from their

end by design,

roads that often have

nothing to face

but the season

and pure space.

Originally written in French, the words don't have the same power that they do in their original state. However, it conveys exactly what I think about random tragedies. Nothing makes sense and nothing appears as though it has a design, but time forces us to deal with what comes ahead, the 'season and pure space' of life. I pray for Liam Neeson, his boys, and their family and friends, on getting through that next bit of road.