I met an old lady once while visiting friends in New Jersey. She was the life-long friend of these friends, who helped ease my turbulent adolescence. She in turn helped soothe my friends’ descent into Alzheimer’s disease. I hadn’t thought about her in years. But yesterday, in the aftermath of Sandy, my friends’ son told me of going to her house, where she lives alone, away from her crazy daughter, who rarely visits her. Alone in her own descent into age. Alone without power, without light. Burning a gas stove, which can throw off carbon monoxide, for heat.

I want to get in my car and drive up to New Jersey and rescue this old lady. I want to rescue her and all the other people whose lives have been swept away. I’m obsessed. After not having watched the evening news in years, suddenly I am in front of the TV every night at 6:30, hungry to know more about what’s happened today.

The old lady resists leaving her apartment and insists to my friend that she’s all right. But we know that it is not all right, that the storm has ripped away our foundation, overturned our habits, so that sitting in the dark, alone, by stove light, seems OK.

The words New Jersey make me want to cry right now. This is the state where my grandfather lived, where my father was born, where I was born. I remember the trips across the refinery fields, the graffiti on the big rock by the bridge on the way to Englewood, the old Italian lady who was a patient of my grandfather’s, who welcomed my sisters and me into her kitchen, we receiving through her the results of my grandfather’s generosity.

I want to wrap them all up in my arms, dead or alive, broken or whole, and tell them that it will be OK, that someone loves them, that someone sees them and their pain. I am speechless in the shadow of so much devastation happening in the place of my birth. I must be tied with invisible threads to that landscape. The ghosts of that land are screaming, crying out. All their hearts are open and raw.

What I really want to say is that my brother is up there. He is OK, but he is a witness. He too will need to be comforted, because he has seen the old lady, sitting alone, in her kitchen, in the dark.

I feel lost, I don’t know where to turn, who to talk to. I am alone in my own kitchen, breathing in the carbon monoxide of the blue burners.

What I really want to say is that it can’t end this way. Someone has to open a window and let the light in, let the gas out. You can get up and walk outside, in the midst of upheaval, and see, above the floods, above the debris, the clear light of the moon and the stars all around it.

The old lady has gone to sleep now. She is dreaming a happy dream, from her youth, when laughter and love were plentiful.

There are many small ways to help open a window for someone who has been affected by Sandy. Here is a link from Brian William’s Rock Center of ways to assist those on the ground in the recovery effort that will be updated regularly. The Community Food Bank of New Jersey and Feeding America along with CityMeals on Wheels are some of the groups working to provide meals and valuable check-ins with seniors.