Destruction/Creation

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Hope Amongst the Ruin

These have been dark days lately, so much loss, so much change.  It’s been hard to see the light through the trees, but I keep looking out, thinking, knowing, hoping that eventually, the darkness will give over to the light and I will feel whole again, ok again, me…again.

Today, that spot of light came in this follow-up on character studies of New Yorker’s that the NY TImes has been featuring to see how they fared through Hurricane Sandy:

Catherine Kendrick, 78, dock master and lifeguard-at-large for the City of Yonkers, evacuated her office on the city pier, where she has kept watch for 60 years, even after her lifeguard husband, Frank, died while rescuing a woman during a storm 10 years ago.

Ms. Kendrick’s health is shaky and over the past year, while sitting sentry at the pier, she had been crocheting a “going-away blanket” to cover her coffin when she dies. She rescued the blanket, which took on new meaning for her after she spent nearly 10 days with no power and sleeping on a lawn chair in her dank, dark apartment.

“The storm changed my mind,” she said on Wednesday. “I’m going to redo my apartment in pastel colors to match the blanket, and I’m going to use that blanket in life, not death.”

This 78-year old woman and her “going-away” blanket made me think that no matter how old or how sad or how devastated we may be, life is in the living, not the dying.  In focusing on the future or the past we forget to live in the present and that is usually all we have.

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