We're All From the Island and We're All From Away

It's a random day in early March. Nowhere near that day in September we all know and remember and deal with in a billion of our own ways. But yesterday, on a random day in early March, I decided it was time to click on Apple TV and watch Come From Away.

Like with so many Broadway musicals, I'd wanted to see it live and in person. But like with so many Broadway musicals, things like money and hard-to-find-childcare-for-a-disabled-child and, well, just life...it all got in the way, and the show closed in New York. But thanks to Apple TV, I got to have a Come From Away experience, and it turned out to be the best one possible for me at this moment.

[Sidebar on Apple TV. I hear all of you. "Dammit. I have to get another streaming service for this???? No, just no, gotta draw the line somewhere." You're preaching to the choir, brothers and sisters. There are too many, and I have too many. But for the sake of Come From Away and Ted Lasso and Schmigadoon and a lot of Snoopy/Charlie Brown stuff that my son and husband adore, here we are. I accept your judgment.]

So why was sitting in my basement office, with a blanket crochet project in my lap, all alone, with Apple TV queued up on my largest tablet, the best possible Come From Away experience for me? I'll try to explain.

It felt right to be alone. At least for me. Because folks, I'm not over it. And neither are any of you, of course. And I KNEW I was putting off watching the thing because of the bottomless pit of grief and terror and despair that was immediately dug into all of us on that day twenty-one-and-one-half years ago. It just has to be the right time and place to go there, to have that experience, and be able to come back and do all the things you need to do. You know what I mean?

Maybe you don't know what I mean, so let's fix that. If I'm talking to anyone who doesn't know about Come From Away, you may have Googled it by the time you've gotten to this paragraph. But in a nutshell, it's about a 9/11 event that answers the question, "Wtf happened to all the planes in the air when it happened?" An airport in Newfoundland, Canada, in a town called Gander, is what happened. That's where thirty-eight planes carrying about seven thousand passengers touched down and that's where a nearly indescribable event happened to the people of the town and the people on the planes. The population of that town doubled the moment those planes touched down, and the show tells the story of this monumental, unprecedented, surreal event in ways too beautiful for this writer to articulate, just see it.

I say that the event in Gander is "almost" indescribable, because a few brilliant individuals found the perfect way to describe it. A musical. On a stage. Yes, the theater. Two people, named Irene Sankoff and David Hein, somehow, by some unknowable miracle, described it. And yesterday, in my basement office, working with my crochet hook on the blanket slowly growing in my lap, I had the story told to me, and I won't ever be the same.

While I regret not experiencing Come From Away from a seat in a darkened theater (an alternate dimension of space and time where everything is possible and you're transported to realms you've only dreamed of, or haven't even yet dreamed of), and while I WILL see it from a seat in a darkened theater if I ever have the opportunity, I'm grateful I saw it the way I saw it. Sitting in my basement office, growing my blanket stitch by stitch, soaking said blanket as tears upon tears fell into my lap while I relived that day with those people. The ones from Gander, and the ones from away.

Do you crochet? Or knit? (I can't knit, it's too hard.) If you're working on something with a regular pattern, like a blanket, for example, you slip into a place where your hands are doing the thinking and your mind is free to be places it might not normally have access to. And stitch by stitch, not that you're aware of it, your hands are making something like a prayer. It might be like with beads. Prayer beads. Rosary beads. Bead by bead. Stitch by stitch. Prayer by prayer gets woven into the fabric in your lap. And tear after tear that falls, they bless it.

The people in Come From Away--we watch them learn about the events as they happened. And we're transported back to where we were, what we were doing, how we coped, how we did not cope. If you haven't experienced Come From Away yet, I'll tell you what will happen when you do. Some person on that stage will indeed BE you. Maybe more than one of them will BE exactly you. You'll go, "Jesus Christ, that's exactly how it was, that's exactly how I felt."

You'll remember trying to process the loving-kindness amidst the terror. You'll remember trying to wrap your head around how something so cruel could be done by people made of the same kinds of cells and tissues and blood and bone as the people who helped, who gave everything they had.

You might remember, like I did, waking up on September 12, having a few blissful seconds before remembering, and then feeling the weight of a thousand cinder blocks crush your chest as you came to the surface and knew you hadn't dreamed it. You might remember, like I did, singing "It's the end of the world as we know it and I DON'T feel fine" on a loop in your head for weeks and weeks. Because it was. And I didn't.

Whoah it hurts. It hurts a lot to go back there. But then there's a surprise as something else rises up. If you watch like I did, the credits will roll, and the fiddle music will play, and you'll sit and you'll breathe and you'll pull yourself back into your life, and something will lift. Unexpectedly. You'll wonder what it is until you figure out what it is, and this is what it is: It's something healing that's been long left unhealed. That's what you'll be feeling. I swear it's true. Not that the whole thing will heal. Not the whole abyss. That's not how it works. But something dark in you from that day twenty-one-and-one-half years ago, from that experience, from that "nothing will ever be the same" moment that changed us all...something of that darkness will retreat a bit, and something of the Light will fill that space for you. I don't know how I know it, but I unequivocally know it.

In my basement office, with my hook and my yarn and my hands and my tears and each breath and each stitch, I was moving just the tiniest bit closer to healing the tsunami of grief that we all share from that day. Every last one of us that was a conscious person on September 11, 2001, are exactly the same in that way. Like the playwrights and the cast and the musicians and the crew of the show are telling us with every breath and word and note, we're all the people from the planes and the people of the town. We are them and they are us. And because of the genius of the theater, all of the dozen cast members are sometimes playing an islander and sometimes playing a plane person. Perfection. Pure and simple.

Neither Apple TV nor the producers of Come From Away are paying me to write this piece, but they're welcome to.

Love to you all. See some theater. Stream it if you can't get there. Get there if you can. The Light is always there just waiting to be invited back in, even if it's a little at a time. Come From Away reminded me, and we can use all the reminders we can get.