My grandmother died a year ago today. On Tax Day. For some reason, after all that went on during the four and a half months leading up to her death, I found comfort in the fact that Gram got out of doing her taxes this one time. My grandmother was incredibly financially shrewd and might have hated giving her hard earned money to the government more than anyone else I know. So it was a kind of justice that she skipped out on the day taxes are due. During her stay there, the nurses in the ICU often remarked that Gram was “a feisty one.†If they only knew.
The tragedy that happened at the Boston Marathon last April 15th, as horrific and sad as it was, has little meaning to me. This is because I experienced it through a muted television in a hospital room in which my grandmother took her final gasping breaths while hooked up to a monitoring system that now, instead of reflecting her pulse and blood pressure and oxygen levels (that my aunts and grandfather and I used to anxiously watch like hawks), only showed a ticking clock underneath the word “Comfort†in small letters. However selfish it is to say, I experienced a far greater tragedy that day, and as a result, the Boston Marathon bombings fail to resonate with me.