Multiple Sclerosis Carer

Don was always a poor sleeper, and would be up at all hours of the night.  In the early hours of 12 September (this is Australia, remember), maybe two o’clock in the morning, he suddenly shouted out to me, “Barb!  Come here!”  I got out of bed and rushed into the living room where he was watching TV, and he just wordlessly pointed to the screen.  I watched for a few minutes puzzled.  Obviously it was a movie.  He looked at me and said, “That’s happening in America.  Right now.  It’s happening.”  I sat and watched with him, and we watched that plane plough into the building, over and over and over again.  And still couldn’t believe it, no matter how often we saw it.  I had to go to Sydney the next day, and again we were glued to the TV with the people we were visiting.  It just seemed as though we had to watch that terrible thing endlessly, trying to comprehend.

It made people talk to each other in unexpected places.  My friend got onto a bus in the morning to go to work, having just heard the news, and blurted out, “Planes have crashed into New York!” and suddenly the whole bus was buzzing with talk, people explaining to other people who hadn’t heard the news yet.

Thinking back over some of the things that have happened in the ten years since, in the world and in our personal life, I think it’s a good thing we couldn’t see the future.  So many terrible things have happened.  But good things happened too, and if we knew about the bad stuff, I always think we would focus exclusively on that.  We would miss out on the joy and the things we should treasure.

It’s been one heck of a decade.