Oh Canada! (warning, this blog entry is intended solely for the purpose of getting it out of my brain, you may want to reconsider before reading)

I love the Olympics. I loooooooove love love love LOVE them. I love the Summer Olympics the most, but because I am not a fan of favoritism I also love the Winter Olympics the most in a cold, cozy, intimate, Canadia (yes I meant to spell it that way- why? maybe that's a blog for another day) sort of way. Who can forget Jason Lezak stalking, and I mean S-T-A-L-K-I-N-G down the French (oh the special satisfaction from the braggadocio French getting snaked in the final seconds of America's relay) anchor? My neighbors certainly won't, windows open a little after midnight as I screeched (and evidently Michael Phelps and I felt the same way about it) my celebration at the top of my lungs - I can almost feel my heart pounding again. But enough about the Summer Olympics, lets talk about Vancouver 2010.

I love les Jeux Olympique. I love the way Apolo (Anton) Ohno scooted his foot across the finish line to snatch a silver medal from the jaws of certain defeat. I love the way he is satisfied with whatever place he comes in, despite constant manhandling from the Koreans.

I love the love story of Shen and Zhao. I love the way they skate as one. I love the way they look at eachother after each throw and side by side triple toe loop in triumph. I hate clowns and I even loved the sad clown routine of the German figure skating couple with the Russian names...could be the song, or the makeup, or the late hour, but it brought a tear to my eye.

I love Hannah Kearney's pigtails sticking out of her helmet, making me think she was half her actual age. I love the Canadiens, eh, finally breaking their no gold on home soil curse with that UNbelievable moguls run by Bilodeou. And I especially love the reaction of his brother Frederic, as he watched from the stands. (It made me a little nostalgic for my little brother Ben.)

I love the way the stories of these strangers so enrapture me that I will cry, laugh and exult in their experiences as if they are my own. To me, the olympics are my biennial chance to park my rear on the couch for two weeks and peek in on what is best in the world, not only athletically, but also on a "human" level.

But I HATE, with every ounce of me, every fiber of my being, I hate what happened last Friday. I hate the senselessness of it, I hate the media capitalizing on the story, playing it over and over again, its seeming glorification of it, I hate it...and I don't really ever use the word hate.

On Friday, I was minding my own business, checking out Facebook, when I noticed a weird post from one of my sisters. It said something like so sad about the luger. Several people commented as if they knew what she was talking about. Because I am the number one fan of the Olympics, I was stunned to hear that they had already started when I KNEW the opening ceremonies were not until 7PM that night. I was soon informed that a luger from Georgia, Nodar Kumaritashvilli had died. It sounded like a sad story, but I was relatively unaffected by it. I chalked my sister's reaction up to the fact that she has older children and the fact that they were that very weekend participating in winter sports. I put it out of my mind for the next several hours.

Until Bob (annoying) Costas came on the TV that night and emblazoned it in my mind forever. Forewarned that there would be images I did NOT want to see, I fast forwarded through the first showing of the accident...believing it would be the last. How wrong I was. They played it over and over again. With no warning the video would run again and I would rush to fast forward through the DVR'ed event that I had joined about fifteen minutes into its airing. They played the accident even when it didn't make any editorial sense to play it...it seemed, as my brother put it, to be "death porn." Which brings me to the thing I hate most about this whole thing. Death. I am not OK with it, even though I know it is a part of life. There is something about the sundering of the spirit from the body that I feel I am just not supposed to be witness to. I feel like there are too many consequences to the psyche that I do not want to have to deal with. I have to pray when I see an ambulance speeding up the road or a car accident on the highway that those people aren't dead. I can't, nor do I want to, imagine what my husband and other people who have watched their loved ones die right in front of them must feel, or how they can bear the impossible pain of it. I was not even OK with seeing the wax-figurine-like corpse of my mother in the funeral home as we (my sisters and I) "fixed" it up for her wake. I was certainly NOT alright with the glazed, absent, fevered stare from my brother Ben, serving as the last glance I would ever get from him. AND I AM NOT OK WITH THEM SHOWING SOMEONE DIE ON TV. NOT ONCE and ESPECIALLY NOT COUNTLESS TIMES OVER AGAIN.

I have either averted my mind's eye so as not to look directly upon that memory, or I successfully averted my anatomical eyes even the times when it snuck up on me, but what I did see seems indelibly inked on my brain. The horror of it, the unspeakable sadness that his parents must deal with for the rest of their lives, the vicious irony of sending your son to the pinnacle of athletic competition only to have him die during a training run, the agonizing survivors guilt for family and fellow lugers alike...these thought turn and burn and course through my mind. I wish to banish them forever. I wish I could rewind and never have had them in the first place.

The evening wore on there were more things I came to hate. I hate how there was the suggestion that he made a mistake, that well, it was his fault after all. No! You should not have to be PERFECT, the tolerance for lifting your head, or shoulders or whatever the thing he did WRONG was, should not be so small that it ends in death. I hate that a local news program didn't turn off the sound feed for the accident during the late night news. Really, you aren't paying a producer to make sure no one hears that? I hate that on Saturday they FINALLY decided they weren't producers of snuff vids and FINALLY stopped airing the accident. Finally stopped airing a boy's death. I hate that on Saturday they suspended practice runs so that they could build a wall-WHY wasn't it built already? I hate that on Saturday they moved the starting line down lower so that you couldn't possibly be taking that curve at 90 MPH - WHY wasn't that done after one of the 14 previous luge accidents happened that week?

I hate this. I hate it so much. It is too soon to tell, hopefully writing about it will scale down the noise about it in my head...

My only comfort comes in the hope (and because my life is a musical, there is a song Death Bed, by Relient K that is the soundtrack to this comfort) that he flew into the arms of Jesus and that when he closed his eyes on Friday, He carried him home.