Tomorrow makes it ten years on....

Tomorrow, we'll be observing the tenth anniversary of the Boston Marathon Bombing. 

Hard to believe that tomorrow makes it ten years on...

I still have very clear memory of that day...

My husband was in chemo, hoping that second time would be a charm for a cancer recurrence. Turned out, it wasn't, but at the time we were guardedly optimistic. On the morning of April 15th, Jim and I had been over at Mass General Hospital's infusion center in the Yawkey Building. We followed our usual routine: Jim dozed while the chemo dripped in; I sat next to him reading - both of us swathed in the lovely heated blankets the nurses always issued in that way too cool infusion center.

On the way home, as was our custom, we stopped for lunch. 

That day, we ate at Scampo in the Liberty Hotel, right next door to MGH.

We had our usual: a wonderful scallop dish (no longer on the menu: just checked) and a peach Bellini.

Sounds odd to go out to a fancy lunch (and Bellini) just after chemo, but on Day One of a chemo week, Jim was always pumped with steroids and had more energy than he was going to have for the next little while. And he always felt pretty good on Day One, before the poison kicked in.

Anyway, we got home, and I went down for a nap. (C.f., peach Bellini with lunch.) Jim stayed up (c.f., steroids) watching TV.

Later in the afternoon, he woke me up. 

Something was going on at the Marathon.

We glued ourselves to the news. Mostly. Every half hour or so, I'd look out the front door and spot runners milling around in the mylar heat shawls that made them look like baked potatoes. (Boston Common, just outside my front door, is a staging area for the Marathon.) That and cops. Lots of cops.

Here's something I wrote a week later, which still holds up. 

But what a difference ten years makes.

My husband died in early 2014, so by the first anniversary of the Marathon Bombing, I was a widow. A week or so after that first anniversary, I lost my oldest and dearest of friends, also to cancer. (Is there a widow word for bereft of a much-loved high school friend?)

Then there are the changes in the country since then, and I'm having a hard time coming up with anything that's improved since 2013. We are fractured, on edge. Too much pluribus, not enough unum. The terrorists we're worried about aren't evil Chechen refugees who don't care who gets in their way when they're trying to make whatever angry, confused/confusing point they're hoping to make. Instead, it's right wing domestic terrorists (and a handful of crazy leftists) who are armed to the gills with weaponry and conspiracy theories. And whose points are as angry, confused, and confusing as whatever it was the Tsarnaev Brothers were trying to prove with their terror spree.

But I'm not going to dwell on these mf's. Not today, anyway.

I'm going to think of the victims of the bombings, especially that sweet child, Martin Richard, blown to bits at the age of 8, leaving us to heed or ignore his sweet please "No more hurting people..." 

The Richard family decided to memorialize their beloved child with a little gem of a park in Boston's Seaport District. I walk by or through it every once in a while, always pausing to think of Martin, his family, and the terrible day that was April 15, 2023.

Hard to believe we're ten years on...