Last night while driving home, and this morning while driving in, I listened to two different but remarkably complementary This American Lifes – Lives? – Lifes. In one,   a teenage girl’s mother, in her last month to live, writes her daughter a  letter for each of her birthdays, which her father then gave to her each year – letters filled with wisdom and anecdotes and subtle guilt. Later in life, said teenage girl falls in love, gets married, and then looses her husband in a car accident.

Second story: a woman, married with kids, having never been sick in her live, suddenly becomes obsessed with whether or not she has breast cancer, and starts to give herself 40 self exams a day: sneaking away to bathrooms, waking up in the middle of the night, bruising herself, determined to find something that just isn’t there. Meanwhile, she’s plagued with guilt over her anxiety born from normalcy, knowing full well that there are actual people with, you know, actual breast cancer.

I can’t help but shove these two stories together in my mind. It should be a blessing to go through life without tragedy / loss, but does a lack of tragedy / loss create a new sort of tragedy that’s just as bad, but perhaps even worse because there’s nothing really there? An empty, baseless tragedy? Please stay tuned to the body of my work which will somehow answer this question long after my death which will most likely create small and large tragedies in the lives of at least ten people.