I know this, but still ...

I've been trying to get my house and my mind ready for life with one leg instead of the usual two, which will begin next week. I've lived on crutches long enough to have some idea of how to set things up, but now I'm moving to the first floor, into a different room. The room that was my late parents and has stayed much the same since they died six years ago, except for clearing out a lot of their clothes.

My grandfather, who died in 1952, six years before my birth.

I'm taking down some of what they had hanging up and putting up some things I like. Paintings by artists friends of mine, for example. Other things from elsewhere in the house. 

I'm doing the practical things too, of course. My clothes, bathroom things. A friend told me that keeping busy with these things would help me cope with it all, but I'm not finding that to be true. I need breaks now and then, and those involve going out to buy food items that keep.
Through all this, I realize how childish and selfish I'm being. I think of the slaughtered children in Florida and what their parents are enduring and I realize that my feelings about losing one leg are laughable. Any one of those parents—and people who loved similar victims everywhere—would be overjoyed if they could have the deceased returned to them with no legs or even arms at all.