“In a Thousand Years or Two…”
July 3, 2011-TH-
(Full disclosure: this is deep, about JBD and grief, and life)
“Hey You”
The Clarks
I won’t forget today
The sun is bright the sky is blue
I won’t forget to pray
Day is night the world is new
The pain will go away
In another year or two
In a hundred years or two
In a thousand years or two
The sun is bright the sky is blue
I won’t forget to pray
Day is night the world is new
The pain will go away
In another year or two
In a hundred years or two
In a thousand years or two
If you’re gonna fly
Hey you, don’t cry
You gotta live to die
Hey you, goodbye
A song penned by one of the best “small” bands in America, written in the aftermath of the September 11 terrorist attacks and their experiences being in Pennsylvania and living their own lives at that moment in time. Reality is; the song might be one of the most appropriate songs ever, written in grief over people lost that they didn’t even know, yet a song that reflects on the loss of those we do know.
Our goal when we agreed to do The Blog was not to get tied down in the past, but discuss the present and the future, and keep our heads high. In some ways we were foolish, The Blog has been incredibly therapeutic and cathartic for us and has made us think outside the box and been one of the healthiest things we have done; but we were innocent in our expectation that we could pick up a year later in writing and not tie it back to what the past year has entailed. It’d be one thing if we were through The Lawsuit, but we’re still dealing with injuries that are both physical and emotional, and we have not been able to tie up the loose ends that The Lawsuit causes. We hope we don’t alienate any of you, but you have to understand that we’re still grieving, still processing, and still attempting to understand what happened, what is happening, and what will happen all related to The Crash and The Wedding. We hope that as we look back on our words and thoughts down the road from The Blog, we’ll see the growth that has arrived from being direct with our feelings, issues, and what our lives have become. We hope to share that growth with you all over the next weeks and months; but I think we have admitted that the growth won’t come nearly as quickly as we were expecting.
As we are quickly approaching 2000 hits on our Blog in the first few weeks of being up and running, it was a song that kept coming back to me; the lines “in another year or two, in a hundred years or two, in a thousand years or two” reflect what the grieving process really is. The “thousand years or two” kept ringing around in my head, so I figured it was the topic of appropriateness for our first mile marker in terms of Blog statistics.
It’s also a reflection that at this point in the game the people hitting The Blog every day are those that we know and love, and for many of you; that means you’ve also been working through emotions and grief and attempts to understand “why” in relation to what we have all gone through. Lauren and I don’t view ourselves as isolated in this lifelong situation, we are the first to state that what happened with The Wedding included hundreds, if not thousands more than those that were directly invited. Just looking around Jim’s funeral and the 1000 people that were there (who else besides JBD would have a fire marshal working the door like a bouncer at a bar, “one in/one out?), is a sight and experience I will never forget. Gaining some of our closest friends like B, CF, and East Coast Hoosier since The Crash, tied together because of The Crash, is not exactly what we expected, but we’re totally thankful for it. Not 48 hours goes by when I log onto Facebook and one of Jim’s many best friends have a post about him up, and I’m sure there are many more that I’m not even friends with that have been typed and I’ve never seen.
A somber salute with our “What Would Jim Do” bracelets in Carmel, CA
I guess what I’m trying to say without getting preachy (I hate preachy), is that just like the lyrics of the song allude; I don’t think this ever goes away. I had a great discussion with East Coast Hoosier last week about this very topic and it’s something that has been sitting in my gut since. I think we’re all naïve if we think it’s ever going to “be okay” in terms of what happened, but I think it’s also incredibly foolish to let what happened consume us; it’s part of us all and always will be but you have to “hit the floor with both feet running when you wake up” as Mrs. D. says. I laugh when I think of something funny, I cry when I think of what was lost, and I force myself out of bed every day to attack whatever challenges exist. So, as The Blog still seems small enough that we don’t have many people we don’t already know from real life reading it, I wanted to address those of you personally that are here with us; be it you currently live in Denver, NYC, Boston, Chicago, Indy, Avon, Brownsburg, Toledo, Columbus or any of the other hundreds of places both near and far that feel this same pain personally, we’re all tied together in this common thread of life. To those of you that are following this Blog that don’t know us or any of the others personally, I’m sure you can relate to your own “common thread of life” situation.
So on that incredibly serious and somber series of thoughts, I got a text recently from a friend that said “Who knew I’d find the meaning to life on a Mike’s Lemonade bottle. Life is a mystery to be lived, not solved”. Guess it’s better to have that on the side of the bottle…than the bottom, eh?
Cheers
-th