Update

It seems disingenuous to continue blogging as if life is going well when something horrible has happened. Yet sharing too many details in a public place seems disrepectful of the privacy of those involved, not to mention it forces casual readers to become witnesses to a situation they may prefer not to be involved in.

This is a balance I always walk when a certain sort of family crisis recurs.

It helps, perhaps, that I am not actually capable of writing about it in a fluent, pleasant, or even readable way. This is not the sort of experience I can use as fodder for future stories. It would be disrespectful, and it would be beyond me. One of the friends I emailed last night told me I was being quite poetic with my words, but that was the poeticism of someone trying to turn a disaster into an aesthetic event, and still being in enough shock to do it.

In brief: something has happened. I was not directly involved. No one has died or been permanently injured. The shock of this will continue for some time, and when it wears off I cannot predict what my emotional state will be. I hope to keep this from interfering with my work–and in fact professional work provides some structure, and I feel driven to dive back into my fiction writing, to both escape and process this.

With that in mind, I’ll link to a previous post in this blog, on art and tragedy. And it is very fitting that I choose to represent my hypothetical heroine dancing memorials, not writing them–for a writer, especially one who cannot dance, this must be the ultimate confession of impotence.