Remembering

Today is the 12th anniversary of the bombing of the Murrah building in Oklahoma City. It seems like it happened such a long time ago, and yet I remember that week so vividly, it might as well be yesterday. It was quite a surreal time for me, for several reasons.

I was home that day (a Wednesday) with the flu. I would have been home that day, anyway...having just been laid off from my job at a non-profit arts organization two days earlier. They actually had called me in from being home sick to let me know that they were laying off much of the staff, since the board had failed to reach their fundraising goals for the year, and they figured a good way to make up for that would be to get rid of most of the professional staff and run the place with volunteers for a while. (Yes, it was every bit as stupid a management decision as it sounds.) I was stunned, and angry, since I had worked myself nearly to death that season to keep things going in the absence of a co-worker who had taken an extended mental health leave. (She was one of the two employees they KEPT, ironically.) I took my stunned self home and spent the next couple of days laying on the couch, too physically and emotionally miserable to do anything else.

That was Monday afternoon. On Wednesday morning I was still on the couch. (Okay, I'd been up and down a few times--critters to care for and all, but my main focus had been the couch.) I had the TV on, and I remember Regis and Kathie Lee had just started their morning babble. Suddenly the local station broke in--there'd been an explosion in Oklahoma City. No further details were yet known. Back to regular programming only briefly, and then they cut away again. There would be no return to regular programming for some time. In some ways, there'd be no return to "regular programming" ever. A certain part of our national innocence was lost that day, I think. An even bigger part was lost on 9/11, of course...but that was the first time I remember thinking "we're not really safe anywhere." Here in the middle of the country, in the middle of the week, in the middle of the morning, people in the middle of mundane tasks suddenly lost their lives in such a senseless, horrible way. People at their desks. Senior citizens stopping by the Social Security office with their grandchildren in tow. Children at daycare. Children.

Having nowhere else to be, I was free to watch the coverage pretty much nonstop for the next couple of days. And I did. I couldn't tear myself away. It was so awful, and yet I couldn't stop watching, and crying. It made the little personal pity party I'd been having seem ridiculous, of course. I'd only lost a job. I could get another job. I hadn't lost a child, a parent, a sibling, a friend, my hearing, my skin, a limb. Just a bit of innocence.

The traditional memorial in OKC on this day is 168 seconds of silence, one for each life lost that day, followed by the reading of the names. I'll do the 168 seconds of silence here.

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Rest in peace.