New Year's Day

New Year's Day 2012. This is a day when people usually look back, look ahead, etc.

I don't want to look back on the year just past. It sucked. Words I would use to describe it include: devastating, catastrophic, duck and cover. I just really don't want to reflect on it.

Looking ahead has a bit of comfort in it in a sort of ignorance is bliss sort of way. I don't look forward in the way that I used to. There will never again be that "all is right with the world" feeling for me. But, I am allowing myself the thought and hope that 2012 will be better than 2011.

I am reading a book right now ( The Year of Magical Thinking). It is memoirish type thing about an author whose husband keeled over at the dinner table one night when they returned to their NYC apartment after having visited their 20 something, comatose daughter in the hospital. There isn't really a story to it. It is this woman working through the first year after her husband's death. At one point in the book she wrote basically that grief was passive and that mourning was the work, the therapeutic putting together of broken pieces. That line, "grief is passive", has stuck with me. I understand that. The last nine months have been marked by grief. I think I am ready for the mourning part. I kind of have to be. I don't like being in a passive state. I don't like being sad and miserable almost all the time. I can't allow my children to live that way. So I guess that is what I am looking to happen in the year ahead. Still doesn't sound like a barrel of monkeys, but it is what it is.