Random Happenings and Needless Worry

The night before last a friend was injured inside her house here in Hope. A piece of a neighbour's sundeck was severed and picked up by the hurricane force winds, flew over the roof and smashed into her entrance way, taking her out and her daughter, who happened to be going downstairs at that moment. The girl has a concussion and the mother has many broken ribs and other fractures. The extent of her injuries is still being determined. She is in stable condition in the hospital.

Last night, my daughter was late coming back from the ski hill. I was a wreck. I had imagined all kinds of things: that she hadn't even made it to Manning, that she was lying unconscious in the car at the bottom of a cliff, bleeding, broken, and dying of hypothermia, undetected by passing motorists. Another scenario was that she was strapped to a spine board heading to the hospital in the ambulance, after miscalculating a jump on her snowboard. Another was that she was crushed dead, in the car, against a rock face. My imagination went as far as the memorial service, and life after Gillian. Unbearable. I imagined what I would be like, blaming someone and then everyone, that I wouldn't care about anything anymore, I wouldn't care about anyone else. I would crawl inside myself and my spirit would die. My daughter showed up an hour late with a reasonable explanation of the delay. It turned out that she and her friend (the driver) were helping someone out.

I could say the worry from last night had everything to do with the events of the night before but that wouldn't be true. I could say that ever since I fractured my skull last year in a skating accident I worry more, or that ever since I rolled my Suburban down an embankment in icy road conditions about 8 years ago, or that ever since my son Paul was brought down the ski hill on a stretcher 9 years ago, or...

Worry is such a useless and debilitating emotion and I wish I could purge it from my being forever.