Every junkie is like the setting sun

Someone started a game of Telephone at the party yesterday, and wouldn't ya know it, by the end the message was "bagina." Kids these days. This morning I answered my phone to a solid minute of Little Sister sobbing. She had been on the phone with our mother and it was a brutal assault on love and reality. I rode my bike to Target and felt mystical connections between 9-11, A Prayer for Owen Meany, and the telephone game. And me and my sister.

The thing with 9-11 is that I was in an Armenian village when the planes hit the towers. No one spoke English and I spoke the Armenian of either a stupid adult or precocious toddler. Apart from the pictures and the talking and the talking about the pictures, and awash in a country of pain and tradegy and genocides, I didn't feel attacked; I was sad because a tragic thing had happened, and I received dispatches from the pain of the people I love. This pain, like ripples in bodies of water, mirrors and touches the pain that other people are in, and it made me feel sad and tremendous and small and powerless: like a human.

And like Owen Meany's predestination, I wonder that life I've led up until now was preperation for the eventual tragic end of my mother. Little Sister's tears were for sadness and loss but also a degree of shock: how can this be our mother? Hateful and stupid, fueled by narcissism and a staggering amount of pills and booze, how can this be the message at the end of the line? I'm getting it second-hand: I know what she's become, but only through the barrier of my little sister's body and soul. Telephone, telephones: we have to call children's services; we have to call the pharmacy; we worry for the call that she's dead. And I try to hold the pain of our family, really personalize it, but I feel the same universality that I did when I heard about 9-11--I can't stop my heart from amplifying into our family, out to the children I've met, to all the people you love and your love can't stop their pain, all the lives lived and died in the span of anguish.

When I was young, there were key people that were terrified for how sensitive I was. I heard their concerns when I went into child welfare, but the heart wants what it wants, and avoiding the truth is lying, too. I am so grateful, now, to have felt how that our horrible pain is universal and also precious and deserving of all the attention in the world. My mother's tragic, wasted, increasingly monstrous life is one of millions crashing around the world right now, and it also deserves a moment of silence the universe over.