Much like people spend obscene amounts of money to bury their pets but not their parents, I am completely and utterly fascinated by the ways in which we publicly grieve for those we've never met.

I hate this week.

Every year for eight years now I have hated this week. PTSD rears its ugly head. I have bad dreams about planes, and fire, and the smell of jet fuel and the uncensored press room feed soundtrack of bodies hitting the ground.

Eight years. An eternity and a heartbeat and the reality is somewhere in between. There is so much life that has happened between now and then that I don't even know how to articulate the difference. 302,952,960 more heartbeats than they got. Give or take a few.

I realized earlier that a high school freshman was in first grade when the towers fell, when the hole blossomed in the heart of the Pentagon, when how we viewed the world changed. I wonder if they can possibly fathom what it was like before, what they take for granted after. I kind of hate that. I want to shake them and talk about what it meant, to taste ash, to sit and wait for word, to watch as that great big flag stretched like a bandage across the charred remains of a building and how I had to look at it every day and remember.

I want to cry for how little has actually changed, for false and fake patriotism used to disguise real acts of terror, perversions of justice and the desecration of our Constitution and I'm scared that's all still going on. That we still provide bombs to allies in faraway lands that are stamped "Made in the USA" and kill mothers and fathers and sisters and brothers and breed new generations of people for whom the United States is the worst of four letter words. I can't even be mad at them, when we make their martyrs.

8 years. 416 weeks. 2,920 days. 70,080 hours. 4,204,800 minutes. 302,952,960 heartbeats. I still remember, because I don't have the luxury of being able to forget.

The woman across the street died today. It was not a surprise. She has been fighting breast cancer for the last couple of years, actively dying for the past couple of months. Over the past two weeks all of her children have come home, her grandchildren, the driveway and street littered with visitors coming with food and drink, staying a little while to pass the time with her and as much as I’ve always maintained that I don’t want a slow death there is something to be said for this, a wake while still alive.

Today the ambulance came, no lights or sirens. They took their kits in, but no stretchers, and the next car to come was from the funeral home. They don’t use hearses anymore, not for removals. Too disturbing for people, I guess, for our people, anyway, here in America where death is a four-letter word. The dead are carried out to mini-vans that come in any color but black and we avert our eyes from the brightly-colored quilts that now cover what’s left of their earthly remains so as to not be reminded of our own mortality.

I did not know her very well, the woman across the street. They moved here to be closer to better care for her husband, a quadriplegic. It is ironic, of course, that she went first, but those decisions are rarely in our own hands. She was kind, and curious, always asked after A., who played with her own grandkids when they visited. Even a couple of weeks ago she still looked herself, if a little weaker. She must have gone downhill quickly, but stayed long enough to say goodbye.

Maybe I would have wanted that time after all.