Watching the Frontline from the sidelines?

For those who assiduously read this column, you will have noticed there was no new column last week.

On Saturday last, I went to do a quick errand. When I returned Tripp was seated on the deck of our Claverack cottage very contained, very together but what he said was: I don't want you to be too concerned but we need to go the Emergency Room RIGHT NOW.

Don't be too concerned. Emergency Room. All in one breath. How does one put those two things together without some kind of panic? Emergency Room. Not to worry.

These are not phrases that go together easily.

That was the beginning of our weekend. Thankfully, Tripp is a faithful reader of MEN'S HEALTH, which told him that when you bleed the way he was bleeding, it meant you were supposed to go to the hospital.

Emergency room became hospital admission.

So I watched the world go by from his bedside. I watched the news on the small television screen across from his bed but because I was so engaged with what was happening in that room, the entire world seemed far away.

My world, for a time, was all about morphine drips, blood transfusions, things I didn't understand, seeking information, prayer, offering deals to God, all the things men and women do when the person they are closest to are closer to their maker than they like.

>From the bedside of Tripp I watched while people died in Iraq; it did not matter to me. There were beheadings and there were kidnappings. Bombs blew up and Iraqis killed Iraqis.

I was enormously selfish. I did not care about what was happening in the rest of the world - it was unimportant to me. Let the world twist slowly in the wind.

I suspect this is what happens to all of us who are in crisis. Our world becomes our crisis and there is little else that matters or even registers. For four days, Columbia Memorial Hospital was my world. When the day ended there was silence that I did not want intruded upon by harsh events in faraway places that was no more under my control than what was happening down the road.

Saturday, Larry and Alicia were going to come over. They didn't, of course, but later I joined them at a restaurant and over the course of the weekend they generously comforted with planned and unplanned gestures that were both spontaneous and unobtrusive.

At the end of four days the strange, sudden, internal bleeding was brought under control and Tripp's ironic, quiet humor began to reenter our lives. The gray his skin had become regained its natural hue.

But what I learned, again, was one of essentials of life. It's not that I haven't learned it before. But this experience underscored what I am learning in life ALL the time. What is important is who is important in our lives.

At the end of the week last week, I was just too emotionally tired to sort out my experience. As time has marched on, with Tripp returned to work, with my own focus returning, the world continues its fiery march. While focused on Tripp, I forgot, for a moment that there were so many bombs going off in so many places. At the hospital I saw but did not register events. Now events are registering again and there is a deep sigh that the smell of gunpowder is a strong as it ever was.

This week New York realized its murder rate was the lowest it has been in forty years. But while our civic sense of safety from our other citizens is enhanced, the airwaves are also suggesting, not too dramatically, that we keep our eyes out for suicide bombers.

The day Tripp returned to work, the Wall Street Station was shut down for a time. It turned out that there was a shooting there. When we talked that night, his comment was: it was old New York normal. Guns. We were grateful that it was not something out of our new normal: terrorism.