The Tragic Aftermath of Sandy

Monster storm Sandy decided to hit New York with a vengeance.  Not since 9/11 did we feel the same sense of tragedy, vulnerability and despair.  Even if you were lucky enough not to lose power or get flooded, you didn't escape unscathed.  Images of others suffering and mourning great losses was enough to tug at your heartstrings, to say nothing of witnessing the nightmarish lines for gas that still seem to go on forever.  I lost power for eight days and walked around feeling sorry for myself, but my discomfort and misery was nothing compared to that of those who lost everything.  Yet I discovered something about myself.  Misery does not love company.  When you're suffering, you don't want to hear that someone else has it worse.  You want validation for your feelings at the moment.  Later on, when the immediate misery ends and you have more perspective, you feel a sense of gratitude that it wasn't worse for you.  You feel ashamed that you were such a baby, and guilty for saying "Thank God it wasn't me."  But the fact remains that nature proved once more that it could turn anywhere, anytime and shatter our lives temporarily or permanently.  It could kill us mercilessly and take all the comforts we fill our lives with with one swift stroke.  When I first heard the wind, I was laying in bed with the covers over my head and felt afraid the windows would shatter with the impact of the devastating winds, but what struck me most of all was that the wind sounded like a lament, a long, mournful lament, as if already regretting the destruction it would leave in its wake.  This almost grotesque singsong seemed to go on forever filling me with fright and at the same time with a morbid fascination.  It was the cry of death and destruction approaching its victims.  It was our 9/11 of natural disasters and it will scar us forever because there are tragic events in life that you simply never get over.