Reveille

Long since you have dispensed with the notion of a divine plan for your life, except maybe entropy. The real truth is that everything falls apart, and in your case, it did so while you watched from an unsafe distance. You felt the effects which led you to a new kind of exhaustion making you long only for the end of the shrinking days so you could drop your clothes and slip under the sheet to oblivion for days, weeks, months. Then one morning you woke up to a new kind of pain - searing, constant, unrelievable - but the depression evaporated. You wished now only to be able to walk, to sit, to lie down, without pain . And then came the news of the death of your best friend's father- a real war hero who fought together with his own father in World War II - and you walking, sitting, standing without pain at the funeral, and the uniformed sailors and marines, and his enormously beautiful Irish-Catholic family, and your grieving friend in your arms, and some kind of wake up call.