Tears in the Realisphere

I wrote a book as a gift for my nieces and nephews by this title. In the story, the Realisphere is threatened by a tear that they must find and repair. Feels like the realisphere is now actually fraying. I can't get my head around the meaning of all of this, can't spin it into a story with a conclusion, hopeful, despairing, or other -- so I just want to record a few events, impressions, fragments of reality. Maybe I'll come back to this time from a safe distance later.
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I failed to get the bulbs in the ground before it froze.
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December 5th, Central Park, 8:00am, a stranger dropped of a heart attack (I'm guessing) as I waited, corralled with 6,000 other runners, for a race to start.

Friend from Hanover lost father and father-in-law in same week.

High school principal died last weekend.

A holiday card from our dentist includes news that the friendly receptionist who always took pictures of our kids died "suddenly and unexpectedly" (at age 44). Two of the four fish from our Hanukkah gift fish tank to the kids have died.

My neighbor and friend killed last week by her mentally ill son. Her husband struggling to recover from life-threatening injuries. Son jumped in front of a G train. He is now blind.

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What are you supposed to do when you are present, watching, at the moment someone dies?
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We say "break my heart" without ever imagining actually breaking another's heart, opening it, draining the life.
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When a son kills his own mother, there is no one left who will ever visit him in prison.

When a mother is killed by her son, he can't attend her funeral.
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It is possible to lose two wives, one while she is pregnant (and lose the child too), and another at the hand of one's son, and physically survive. What can one possibly do now with the life that remains? How does the heart keep beating?

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Death can open door for estranged fathers & daughters. Then the harder part.
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Peggy's holiday decorations on her new staircase, visible through the open door as EMTs departed and forensic team poured in.
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Hannah's toy stroller on the front porch.
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Joe's house is dark, no Santa on the porch roof this year. He's in Tennessee with stage 4 lung cancer.
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A full moon on the winter solstice. Too strong. The forces that make it all cohere are strained.
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Why did the Vermont X-mas tree guys leave so early this year? I miss their lights on 16th Street on night dog walks. Their scruffy beards and familiar accents.
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A wordless chant from the kids' Music Together class CD drums in my head all week.
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A beloved friend's daughter suddenly struck with relentless seizures.
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Reeve doesn't like riding the train suddenly. The platform terrifies him. He clutches my hand, yells if we lose contact. He is fascinated by the succession of days, before/after, the weeks "going around." (Is time linear or circular?) He checks the clock. Suddenly he wakes up to Time, and so to death?
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"Reeve, do you want to wear a hat?"
"No, because the wind of the train will blow it."
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Peggy's electric Christmas candles still flicker in the windows of the dark empty house. No more sirens, no more banging, so more screaming of living obscenities.
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A sonogram. Technicians who don't even say good morning, who don't introduce themselves, whose first words are, "Pull your pants down below your pubic bone." Then squirt cold gel on one's abdomen and start pressing a wand around. Silent and mechanical.
A hand waving to his mommy! A heart beating purposefully! 29 weeks of existence. Where from? Where to? A spirit, a human being, a life. A mother, anxious for her baby's well-being, afraid to speak, ratty pop music playing on a computer speaker in the corner of the holiest of places.
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The sun isn't even strong enough to power the Home Depot garden lights in the backyard.
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Chocolate-covered pretzels and Diet Coke can make the difference between getting through the day and not.
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Thank god for a boiler that works.
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Duncan - "When you're alive, you don't need your spirit, because you're alive, you can move, you can do what you want, so it just, like goes. But when you die, your spirit comes back, to be here and all around, because your body can't be any more."
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First day past the nadir. Sunny and tolerable to be outdoors.

Reeve's "chicks" (pigeons) fed on bread crumbs scattered by a homeless-looking woman in the center of Bartel-Pritchard Square. The flock pecked, tossing bits back and forth at each other. "Look at the baby, Mommy!" Reeve pointed excitedly - scruffy little brown birds of another unglamorous variety. A truck's engine sent them flying en masse, more balletic than the Blue Angels, streaks of gray careening around the traffic circle in a blur over bare sharp black tree limbs against cold sky, then back to their crumbs.
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A single brown bird has taken up residence on top of one our columns, huddling there at night, leaving by day, returning, leaving a comforting pile of poop below.