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A warning, dear friends:  Tonight's post is about as much fun as its title would indicate.  If you were hoping for more funny stories about food, I'm sure they'll find their way here in the next few days.  They won't be here tonight, though.

I've used this quote in this space at least once before, but it contains so much truth, so concisely stated, that I must call on it again.  One of the best books I own is Debby Bull's book Blue Jelly:  Love Lost and the Lessons of Canning.  Debby Bull is a freelance writer and former staff writer at Rolling Stone who turned to canning after her live-in boyfriend abruptly broke off their relationship.  One day, after returning home from a road trip, she answers her door to a neighbor, an older man who presents her with a bag of lettuce from his garden, a government pamphlet on the importance of eating vegetables, and a promise to pray for her.  After the neighbor leaves, Ms. Bull is flooded with sadness at the idea that while other people found husbands and had children, she only had a bag of lettuce.  She flings herself to the floor, sobbing, and realizes that the worst part of grieving are those days when she felt that she hadn't made any progress at all.

I think about this a lot, not only because it is a beautifully written piece, but because it reflects my least favorite aspect of grief and sadness, the discovery that grief is not a one-way street, that feeling better can take weeks or months or years, but it only takes an instant to feel worse.  I pay a lot of lip service to the stages of grief, and to the necessity of feeling them, but in practical terms, I do not like them, not at all.  I like a nice, clean, linear grieving process, and when my emotions don't bend to my will, I get confused and tetchy.

Unfortunately, real grief doesn't care a button for my idea of a well-ordered universe, and it is ruthlessly efficient at springing sadness on us out of nowhere.  My heart was broken in 17 places by nakedjen's tale of slowly getting used to the loss of her beloved dog Clydesdale, who had kept her company for nearly half her life, only to find herself reading herbal manuals in a bookstore, realizing that she had prepared one of those tinctures for Clyde, and finding herself in tears, missing her dear sweet friend so terribly.  Again, I know it's all part of the process, but I hate this part of the process, and I hate that Jen has to suffer through it.

I hate this idea that we are so vulnerable to being blindsided by grief.  I don't mind the idea that before we can feel better, we have to feel worse.  I do mind the idea that even after we feel better, we can still feel worse, much, much worse.  After my grandfather died in October 2003, I missed him intensely, and in fact, I still do, but for some reason I was spared that blindsided, seemingly-out-of-nowhere, broken-glass sadness.  My mom, though, was not.  She and my grandfather were close, and had become closer during his illness, and she frequently found herself knocked sideways by freight-train-force grief.  I hate this.  I hate any universe that would put her through this.

Oddly enough, the one time I remember feeling this sort of grief out of nowhere was after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.  I say "oddly enough" not because it is odd to feel grief or loss or sadness about 9/11, but because I had been extraordinarily lucky on that day.  Everyone I loved, everyone I could have lost, was safe on that day, and I feel a bit weird glomming onto a sadness that didn't belong to me.  Then again, if you were in the city, or in the vicinity of one of the downed planes, it was impossible to feel that that sadness wasn't a part of you.  There was literally something in the air, something that smelled of ink and cordite, and we were breathing it in, absorbing it through our skin.

After the attacks, I felt plenty of shock, plenty of sadness, and I cried plenty of tears, but they were restrained tears, and the sadness was a controlled sadness, the kind of sadness you feel when you know in the back of your mind that you have only so much time to feel what you're feeling, because you have things to do and people who are counting on you.  Then on September 25, 2001, I got lost.

Not many people remember that September 11, 2001 was a primary election day in New York State.  That was the year of the New York City mayoral race, as well as other state offices.  I had voted on September 11; after the attacks, the mayor and governor had announced that the election would be postponed and that all votes cast that day would be invalid.  We would have to vote again.  On September 25, I voted again.  Now, for all my problems with our government, for all my beliefs that we have a flawed version of a democratic republic, I love the process of voting.  I love the feeling that I am living a civics lesson.  I love that the median age of the poll station workers is about 80, and that if you are under 80, they fuss over you:  they ask if you know how to use the voting machines, they thank you profusely for voting, they do everything short of pinning your mittens to your coat.  So I went back to the polls, I re-cast my votes, I headed to the subway to go to work.  I thought about how neat I find voting, and I thought to myself, "Well, that's one good memory you can take from the 11th.  You can remember how good it felt to vote that morning."  At that instant, I realized that at that moment, the moment I had pulled the lever and felt like Little Miss Citizen, the four planes had been hijacked.  The planes that had left Logan had already turned around and were headed toward the towers; everyone on those planes knew that it had started, while those of us on the ground had no earthly idea.  The realization of it, it froze me in my tracks in front of a gas station, and it made me clap my hands to my face and cry, baby crying, hiccupping sobs the likes of which I had not cried since I was small.  It would not be the last time.

You have to let what will happen happen, my wiser self tells my not-so-wise self, but my not-so-wise self is not interested.  I can see terrible days ahead of me, and I know that there is nothing I can do about them.  One of the dearest friends I have is dying.  Just typing the words makes me feel like throwing up.  (Because I am stubborn, I feel compelled to say that maybe he will beat the odds, and maybe he won't die.  Then I think of a line from Joe Keenan's Putting on the Ritz, used in an admittedly more frivolous context. Philip, the hero, living in a fool's paradise he knows he can't sustain, admits he avoids thinking about his inevitable eviction from said paradise by asking himself not "when?" but "if?", answering "maybe not", and abruptly changing the subject.)  I am clinging on to every shred of hope, kicking and screaming and threatening the universe that it had better do right by my friend.  Eventually, though, it will happen, that to which I can't bear to give voice right now, and just when I think that I will be able to do this, that I will be able to face a future that doesn't include my friend, I know that one day I'll be standing in a bookstore, or flipping the dial on a car radio, or hiking in the Ozarks, and something will happen, something will pop out at me and flood me with loss, and I am going to know that this is the worst thing about loss, and I am going to hate it.