The traumatic thing I alluded to the other day (10/17), well, the person who had triggered that died. I found out late yesterday. So, she died two days after I saw her. Out of respect for the person's privacy, I won't go into details, but I definitely can say that having been in the same room with that person two days ago, death was very clearly in the room. And a bad death it was. My stepdad would always say that death was either the fulfillment of your dreams (assuming paradise and afterlife) or, if nothing else, the cessation of pain and suffering. In the case of this person, I can only assume the latter, but it sucks, because that person was suffering pain for months before her end, and the collective failure of her significant other and her family to take care of her in that time hangs like a shadow over her last days. She was semi-friends with Exene, and had called Exene for help the other day, and Exene had done so, but had needed my help, too, because she wasn't strong enough to move the dying woman, so I helped. I ran into her significant other the day before yesterday, and he'd thanked me for helping out in an "Aw, shucks" kind of way, and I just choked out "Yes, it's a terrible scene." I wanted to ask him why he wasn't there, but didn't. The whole situation was bad, and I can't talk about it without going into a lot of context and back story, but I couldn't help but feel like the building had gotten itself another ghost with the passing of this woman. I don't believe in ghosts, but the pain and suffering of that woman haunts the hallways, all the same. I walk by their apartment and I grimace, because I can feel that. And since they have a child who is a year older than B1, who used to be a playmate of his, it compounds the suffering -- I can only imagine what that kid is feeling, how much emotional damage she's suffered from her father's criminal neglect (or, at best grotesque bungling) of the welfare of her mother, and how that all shakes out. The woman is dead, and I imagine they'll move out of there; I can't imagine them staying in that tiny apartment, now, in the wake of this.
I'm a compassionate soul, and my heart bleeds. I freely admit that. I feel every emotion keenly; I think it's part of my own artistic temperament. It informs my work, the ability to feel things keenly. But in matters of suffering and anguish, it's a double-edged blade, because I feel agony as much as the rest of the emotional palette. And to see what I saw the other day, to know that a person was in such dire straits, and with only so much I could do, it's haunting. Like I said, a ghost. Ghosts haunt that way.
