Red wine on the front porch

After the house concert tonight - which went really well, and which will probably be the last one, at least for the foreseeable future - I sat on the front porch with Marcia and Brenden, two of my favorite people in Baltimore. I used to work with Marcia, and she still holds the title as my first friend in Baltimore. A woman roughly 20 years my senior, she and I have an easy rapport, and for some reason I'm able to talk with her with more ease than almost anyone I know.

Less than a month ago, she lost her 48-year old cousin to a sudden heart attack. A cyclist and athlete, his death was a shock to Marcia, who a close brother-sister relationship with him. I've called her and left a couple of messages in the last month, expressing my concern and condolences, and this was first we'd chatted. I found myself listening to her stories of her cousin, and I swapped with her stories of my grandmother. The scientist in me (I started college as a Biology major, after all) is still a little surprised by my reaction to my grandma's death in August. 81. Bad Alzheimer's. She, almost certainly, wanted to go. Yet, the grief was crippling. As I spoke with Marcia, we reflected that grief was the great unexplored human emotion. Love, Isolation, Power - they are all explored with a vengeance. But grief, not so much. We just can't deal, not even the best of us.

Did anyone else listen to This American Life today? I love NPR on Saturdays. First it's Car Talk, which I love; then it's Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me, which I like; and then it's This American Life, which sometimes changes my life. Today, it was about grief, which proved prescient with the conversation with Marcia. A 9/11 Widow was on the show, and told oddly humorous stories of her experience, and I realize now that this is a similar tone with which we spoke tonight. Paradoxically, we use humor to deal with grief, because we don't know much else how to.

On this warm final day of September, Marcia and I drank red wine and sat on the front porch, crying a little and laughing a little and not even moving when the raindrops began to fall around us.