I was walking home on Monday and then there were sirens and a crowd.
A woman stood at the corner, a hand over her mouth.
I asked: “What happened?”
The woman on the corner pointed – there was a body on the street, under a bus. The body had jeans and a gray sweatshirt, but we couldn’t see her head. We watched for movement. None. The woman next to me said: “Oh my god.”
Another woman walked up and asked: “What happened?”
I pointed. A body on the street. Not moving. The EMT knelt by her and then stood. Another ambulance and two fire trucks came the wrong way down the one way street. The EMT waved them to slow.
We watched. And I didn’t know if I should watch or if I should look away, walk away, and give the woman privacy. I felt stunned and frozen. After a while, I left and started walking home. They still hadn’t been able to extricate her from under the bus. At the time, I thought she had died, though later that night I learned that she had sustained severe injuries but would survive.
As I walked home, I started praying for her and her family. I thought, I hope it had been the best day for her. I hoped she’d thrown her arms wide in the morning, and couldn’t believe her luck. I hoped she was well loved. Please god, let her life have been wonderful and filled with joy. Hold her family close now.
Everything around me seemed so bright. It was that moment of late afternoon when the trees are silver veins in russet sky. A woman came out of a building, wrapping a scarf around her throat and smiling at her own thought. A spray of crows dipped and curled into the sky. And the world breathed: stay awake. Don’t miss this.
Sometimes I think that grief cannot exist without joy, that the divine spirit, that God, is a tensile alloy of these things: loss and wonder, crows and light, trees against the sky. And I’ve been grieving and praying for that woman who was hit. I am holding her in my heart, though I never saw her face. I am amazed at this fragile, fragile life, and all the more called to open my heart to this wonder, this breath, this now.
