An entire cottage industry has developed around end-of-year retrospectives, and this year there have even been end-of-decade round-ups. As is usually the case, some are worthwhile, most are not, and all tell us more about the writer than about the topic at hand.
Still, there is an inexorable tidal pull toward writing such a thing, if merely as part of a social covenant. I’m a writer; I’m expected to behave as a writer behaves; ergo, I have to properly wrap up the year for the amusement and edification of my readers. With that said, here goes my own modest effort.
The four-letter word that best sums up 2009 for me: loss.
My workplace imploded, disrupting and destroying the lives of hundreds of my friends, leaving aftershocks that continue today, and taking my own job with it. I lost friends to distance, disinterest, and death. Kittens I cared for died in my arms in spite of my best efforts, while other cats simply disappeared forever. My once reasonably good health is gone and is now at an all-time low, with two hospital visits and lingering effects. And what little financial security I had evaporated in the flux of corporate bureaucracy and continued unemployment. I have spent most of this year in mourning for— well, for everything.
I won’t bother recapping the year on a global scale; you hear enough of the news to know what’s been going on. Every day more jobs are lost, more savings are lost, more lives are lost to war and disease, more insurance is lost. Even hope, which was to have been the keystone of this new era, is being lost.
Of course the year wasn’t without its positive aspects: new friends, new art, new experiences, new opportunities. But try as I might, I can’t muster the self-deception needed to tell myself the ledger’s final entry is in black ink. This year is ending with a spray of arterial red.
No matter what the neatly-framed needlepoint platitudes say, things do not always work out for the best; the world simply doesn’t care what happens. If you believe in a higher power then by all means trust in she/he/it/them to bail you out, and while you’re at it ask if maybe they could help the rest of us, too. But things will not improve on their own via some misty, rainbow-hued deus ex machina.
So how do we make certain 2010 isn’t just a crappy sequel to 2009? It’s going to take a miracle, and you can’t get those with food stamps. Roll up your sleeves and make your own damned miracle. It isn’t easy, but it’s the one craft where we’re all amateurs.
Good luck, everyone. We’ll need it.
