Day of Rest

It's late morning here and I'm still exhausted, both from an event that I worked seven months on and also two deaths.The deaths have me hollowed right out, one the death of Jess Zaslow by car accident as he drove to promote the latest of his wonderful books and,  I'll readily admit, Whitney’s death too.I don’t pray in a way that might be recognizable to the fathers of the faith I was born in, but I do pray in my own haphazard way; never for myself but for others. I’ve been praying for years for Whitney. I prayed for her and for Michael Jackson because both seemed so lost: one mired in a self-hatred that made him turn to scalpels to alter the man in the mirror and the other because - well, because she has looked so sad and fragile for so long now. I just watched some YouTube video her trying to get through the shows on her latest tour and really you have to press 'Stop". You just can’t bear to watch.It was yesterday that I heard of these two deaths and also yesterday that the Multicultural Network of our town put on this amazing event to bring people together. I want to write about Jeff and about the event but I think I’d best wait. I got home at 5 last night; fixed two plates of  food for us and then slept clear through the latest spine-tingling episode of Justified and HBOs’ Saturday night premiere of Something Borrowed and the ten o’clock news, Then I turned out the light  and slept 8 more hours.Prayers work sometimes and sometimes not: that could be one conclusion here. Another could be that you’re in no position to be fussing over somebody else's well-being until you start taking care of yourself.I’ve been sitting in my nightie writing for the last four hours (though none of it was for Exit Only here – this post took five minutes.)I just looked at the clock. It’s after 11:00. High time for coffee and breakfast.But God bless the dead. God bless them; they rest from their labors.[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3xtZHMPcS9I]