Wednesday....

Summer’s tragic accident and passing occurred over these very days in March three years ago. I think about her always and write quietly of her, filling notebook after notebook, and here. Someday soon I will share it in full. Just now... just now....

One thing I remembered as I saw parishioners filing out of the little chapel on W. 51st St today on my way to the Hudson for a run, was how completely dizzied and surreal things seemed outside the ICU the next morning after that first night at the hospital. A combination of shock and sleeplessness, and being shuttled in the middle of the night from the harshly florescent lit visitors room we had been placed in upon arrival (a garbage can holding the door ajar so it wouldn’t lock every time we ventured to hear some word or find a restroom), to the slightly more private and comfortable “consultation room”  where we would spend the next week in vigil. After dawn- still in boots I pulled on without socks racing down the stairs to the street and Summer’s side, still in my blue hoodie, zipped all the way up because I’d torn the t-shirt from my chest to wrap around her sweet, wounded head, kneeling on the sidewalk waiting for the ambulance to arrive - after dawn that next morning, walking to the drinking fountain I discovered that we hadn’t been led, as I thought, to an entirely new floor, but just around the corner. The middle of the night move hadn’t taken 10 minutes, it had probably taken 30 seconds, but time was nothing. Nothing I could any more understand. Soon the overnight empty halls began to crowd with activity. My last day with Summer was over. The first day of the vigil was begun. I couldn’t understand at first the strange sight of blackened foreheads. People passing by with a cross smudged above their… oh, yeah - it was Wednesday. It was Ash Wednesday. Now, I remembered. And now. Now I remember remembering….